ABSTRACT
Through high unionization rates, casino jobs may provide a counterexample to the connection between low-skill service and hospitality work and highly commodified, low-wage labour. Indeed, Las Vegas, due to its high union density, has been called the “New Detroit” while casinos have been dubbed the factories of the service sector. This chapter examines the Canadian Auto Workers’ (CAW) attempt to decommodify labour at Casino Windsor. The CAW brought a decommodified “industrial mind” into the casino industry, and Casino Windsor workers initially did adopt a decommodified vision of wage entitlements; yet casino workers now (2014–2015) embrace a market-oriented ‘service mind.’
I examine whether wages at Casino Windsor would reflect what Windsor stakeholders viewed as Windsor’s soon-to-be industrial past being brought into Windsor’s anticipated postindustrial future. My findings demonstrate that larger political and institutional forces ensured industrial wages would be left in the past. In Windsor, Ontario—an automotive union town—Casino Windsor contributing to the “public good” meant the casino offering “auto wages” (read: high pay relative to skillset). While the casino may not have represented a postindustrial shift in the area’s labour market, it did represent a market-oriented shift in the ideology of the CAW, one of Canada’s most militant private sector unions.
