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Casino group agrees to promote hiring of Baltimore residents

December 19, 2012 at 2:05 pm 3

Baltimore city reached an agreement today with CBAC Gaming LLC, a group consisting of Caesars Entertainment Corp. and local investors, to promote the hiring of Baltimore City residents for the anticipated 2,000 construction jobs and 1,700 permanent jobs at the South Baltimore casino.

A “local jobs” Memorandum of Understanding – approved today by the Board of Estimates – calls on CBAC/Caesars to work collaboratively with the city to implement a community recruitment and hiring plan and to help potential applicants qualify for casino jobs.

Key aspects of the MOU include:

  • A  community recruitment coordinator, funded by Caesars, will join the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development (MOED) to oversee the casino’s local hiring initiative and “aggressively market” qualified city residents to casino contractors and subcontractors.
  • CBAC will give priority to city residents who are qualified to fill its open jobs and seek out candidates who “demonstrate a strong knowledge of and familiarity with Baltimore city culture, lifestyle and amenities.”
  • CBAC will comply with the provisions of the Mayor’s “Employ Baltimore” executive order and will direct its contractors and subcontractors to comply with the requirements, which include meeting with the mayor’s business services staff prior to contract awards, provide MOED with workforce plans that describe the expected number of job openings and post new jobs at the city’s career centers.
  • Every six months, Caesars and its contractors and subcontractors will submit workforce reports to MOED disclosing the number of casino project employees who are city residents.

Number of Union Jobs Unclear

Separately, Caesars Entertainment told The Daily Record that it would “absolutely” use some union labor to build the facility.

Whiting-Turner Contracting Co., the $400 million project’s general contractor, has not said how many union jobs may be open at the site.

Whiting-Turner has, however, agreed to voluntary goals of 25% minority hiring and 10% hiring of women-owned businesses during construction, which is expected to begin early in 2013 and last through mid-2014.

Here and here for more background on the casino.

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  • trueheart4life

    One job “A community recruitment coordinator” for sure … I’m counting!!!  Now let’s see how transparent MOED will be when the hiring numbers don’t make CBAC look like such a great choice for a business partner. I wonder if they will be as transparent as the BDC has been with our friends who are running our twice bombed “South BMore Grand Prix” … Seems we still don’t know how many tickets were sold this year.

  • cwals99

    It is important to remember that all of the ads for gambling and casinos have had the labor unions promoting what they were told would be union jobs.  In Vegas where these casinos are headquartered these casinos are strong union corporations and the union labor was led to believe these casinos, National Harbor and Baltimore, would indeed follow that tradition.  Did O’Malley and Rawlings-Blake, who used the labor unions as endorsement for these pet projects intend to ignore them yet again?

    We have two problems with hiring locally in this deal that are easy to address:

    The training for the positions are handled by union apprenticeship programs that have been in place for decades.  There is no need for taxpayers to train people at ‘career’ colleges since this has always been a partnership between business and union at no public expense.  Why rebuild an already great program?

    Next, we must reverse the damage from the O’Malley and Rawlings-Blake Administrations policy of 0 tolerance policing.  This is when they charge the homeless for loitering and simple violations as crimes so as to make people ineligible for public assistance or housing.  It is this record that keeps people from getting the simplest of jobs.  So, let’s simply re-categorize these simple violations and get Baltimore citizens working!

  • cwals99

    I attended a union meeting where they announced that Caesar’s would not hire union even as the unions were told they would be included.  I encourage all to push to demand as it always seems that Baltimore allows only the lower of labor wage for the working-class.

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