Unless you live in Michigan, with the highest unemployment rate in the nation, we’d advise you to stay put.
The "CityCenter six pack," as the collection of hotel towers has been dubbed, will (ostensibly) employ approximately 12,000 people when it opens. MGM Mirage says, "More than 100,000 people have applied for jobs." Lately there has been an exponentially greater number of applicants than jobs for a new resort opening in the valley over the past many years.
Take Steve Wynn’s Encore, which received 65,000 applications for 5,300 jobs –- a 12.3-to-1 ratio. It was worse at M Resort, which had 37,000 expressions of interest and only 1,800 positions to fill (adding another 250 staffers when business proved far better than expected), for a 20.5-to-1 ratio.
Also, the newest and most expensive properties like to cherry-pick employees from their best competitors. So the likelihood is that you’d have to try and find a job at a hotel-casino much farther down the food chain before you’d have a shot at Aria, depending on your resumé.
In the March 28 issue of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Alan Schlottman, professor of economics at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, estimated that if CityCenter came to a halt, the Southern Nevada unemployment rate would go from 10.1% to 11.1%. Local statistics guru John Restrepo, of Restrepo Consulting Group, concurred.
Since CityCenter employs 8,500 construction workers, that would put the total of employable bodies in southern Nevada at 850,000. When you swap out the CityCenter construction jobs for the 12K it will employ once it opens, it will effect a .4% reduction in the current unemployment rate. However, many jobs will –- theoretically –- open up at older MGM Mirage resorts and at other hotel-casinos, so there’s likely to be a positive ripple effect.
Unemployment figures from the Nevada Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation are even more alarming. On March 20, it put the number of unemployed in the Las Vegas area at 102,500 -- almost 53,000 more than in February 2008. It counts a local workforce of 911,300 people.
The overall population of Clark County, according to the Nevada Small Business Development Center, is nearly 1.97 million people. Throw in Nye County (which encompasses Pahrump) and that’s another 47,000-plus souls. Nevada’s total population, as listed by the NSBDC, is 2.78 million.
