A $500,000 raise.

A 33.33 (repeating, of course) % raise.

At $2mil, each paycheck (26 per year) will be roughly $76,923, after taxes at a 35% rate makes it a paltry $50,000 (or "fifty boxes of ziti", if you're playing in Tony Soprano's card game)

As hourly line employees, we've gotten, over the past few months:

• Our cost of living adjustment (a.k.a. "our raise") taken away

  There are no merit-based raises here. Everyone gets a COLA stuck on yearly and that's that.

  In money terms, this raise would cover the COLA for over 300 stagehands at our current pay rate.



• The standard matching of the first 6% of our 401k contribution suspended for the year

  ...at a salary of $2mil a year, 6% is roughly $2500 per PAY PERIOD. Mr. Murren will max out his 401K contributions by the end of the first quarter of the year.

  I realize that it's not much to retire on, but I'm sure he's got something else cooking on the back burner.



• our insurance premiums upped by $10 per pay period

At 61,000 employees paying an additional $260 a year, that would equal $15,860,000 in medical contributions the MGM won't be making each year. With the conservative assumpion that only 65% of us are full time with benefits, thte number comes out to $10,309,000.

In all fairness, employees that make more pay more. I beleive Mr. Murren is paying an additional $1,300 a year. Luckily, thte MGM has a non-profit branch (funded by employee donations) that exists to provide assistance for employees in hardship.



• The overtime we used to do extra maintenancec? Stripped to zero hours.

  Now the Department Heads have to play fucked games with our schedules so they cacn have enough people to work the show while keeping enough around to do the required work well into the night.



• Total and complete hiring freeze.

  Not enough guys? Sorry. What do you mean "safety concerns"?



• Our operations now dictated by the Accounting Department.

These numbers are laargely pulled out of my approximationo-making ass, but they give a slight indicaion of the volume of dollars here. If you read the article (please, go ahead, I'll wait), you also see that if he does a real good job he can get up to an additional $4.25 million performance-based cash awards.

[The lucky line employee, as an award for high levels of performance, is allowed to come into work as scheduled and keep doinig so until they quit out of frustration, svaing the company money as they're not going to hire a replaement.]

As more out-of-my-ass-math, $4.25mil would cover:

• 16,000 employees not paying more for health insurancce


• The COLI for roughly another 2400 stagehands.


• About a thousand bags of single-serve potato chips t be consumed every hour, every day, for the entire year

  I meantion this because the employee dining room, which is provided ass a benefit by most casinos to their employees, has been tightening the belt mightily.

  Chips used to be free, as in you didn't hve to swipe into the hot food line to get them. They were then moved behind the line about 4-5 months ago, so if thats all you got from there (which many of us do) you had to swipe in. [This is important to the casino becuase the accountants can then say that the company is providing $X per meal to the employee as a benefit and as such write it off]

  These days, you go down there and you swipe in only to discover they didn't even put any chips out.

The kicker of this all is that this contract was written WELL AFTER we all knew thte economy was gonig into the shitter andd the employees were gong to be taking it in the ass to cover for the board.

Cover for the board? What?

Yes. We weren't the ones that thought "Hmm.... Start a $8 billion consruction project? Sounds good. At the same time buy up one of our giant competitors? SOUNDS EVEN BETTER!" That was the board.

These so-called giants of industry that were so finger-on-the-pulse of how business works that they were more wrapped up in making all of the money a once; turning a blind eye to the fact that the good times always come to a crashingly abrupt halt every 5-10 years and the money dries up and if you overextend yourself (with, say, totally overreaching rational usee of credit) you get fucked in the poophole by it all.

The board fucked up, and we're paying for it. They obviously aren't

Only in Vegas.

And yes, I do fully expect in the next 24 hours to have beefy guys in black suits and see-through socks stopping by the house to "have a little chat," so feel free to repost this one at will. Just credit me, as it's the least you can do for a guy living at the bottom of Lake Mead.

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