NEW HAVEN, Conn.—UNITE HERE members wearing green T-shirts that read, “7,000 Jobs / No
Taxpayer Dollars” rallied here Feb. 6 to support MGM Resorts’s plan to build a casino on the waterfront in Bridgeport. The company has agreed not to interfere with union organizing if the casino opens, Local 35 President Bob Proto told the crowd, and would also open a job-training center in New Haven. “This resort will need people who handle money and luggage; people who plan menus, prepare the food and serve it; people who buy advertising; and people who manage the payroll for all those jobs,” New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said. The casino would be the first in the state that’s not on Native American tribal land, and would need the state legislature to enact laws establishing competitive bidding for casino licenses and ending the Mashantucket Pequots and Mohegan tribes’ exclusive rights to them. The first measure would also repeal the state’s approval of a planned casino in East Windsor, a few miles south of MGM’s casino in Springfield, Mass. A spokesperson for the two tribes, which own the Foxwoods Resort and Mohegan Sun casinos, criticized it as “the MGM Massachusetts Protection Act.” Read more
