Why we can't outsource gambling

Why we can't outsource gambling

AMHERST - We had a small epiphany the other morning while reading about the casino juggernaut now steadily advancing on Palmer. We wondered for a moment why, rather than a casino that produces little beyond gamblers suckered out of their money, businesses are not getting together with government to develop something more useful on that 152-acre parcel next to the Mass Pike.

How about a research and manufacturing facility dedicated to renewable energy? To the development of alternatives to gasoline-burning vehicles? To the design and construction of affordable, modular housing that is livable, esthetic, and low-impact?

After all, as a society, we're going to need all these things, and someone is going to have to make them somewhere.

Then we realized where that someone most likely resides: China.

Evidently, someone has decided that we should export the production of the things we need to people who will make them at the lowest possible cost. After all, goods can be made on the other side of the world, loaded in a container, and shipped to the U.S. at lower apparent cost than making them here. (Never mind the hidden costs of ravaged local economies, a deteriorating tax base, and a working population deprived of chances to obtain useful skills.)

Casinos, on the other hand, offer a service (disservice?) that cannot be shipped overseas: the opportunity to get fleeced and have a good time while it's happening.

That's a job that has to be done locally, reasonably close to where the people being fleeced live. It wouldn't do to pack people in containers and ship them off for a weekend of gambling in Guangdong.

Moral hazards have to be located close to home.

And what about all those casino jobs for the people of Palmer and surroundings? First, the construction jobs associated with casino-building are temporary, and the bulk of the high-wage labor is done by skilled workers brought in from elsewhere who will move on to the next project when the casino is done.

Mohegan Sun gains no advantage at all from training local workers to build casinos.

Second, while it may take some skill to run a blackjack table and service a slot a machine, it isn't a lot of skill, and these are not skills readily transferable to other lines of work.

Also, a casino is a fairly dispiriting place to work: They are garish, windowless, clockless places cut off from the outside world by design, thereby ensuring that patrons and employees alike lose all awareness of the world away from the gaming tables and the slots. We are sure that casino workers, exposed day after day to customers desperately hoping to strike it rich but far more often than not leaving the casino poorer than when they arrived, develop a cynical, jaundiced view of humanity.

A casino is not good for the soul: It is a place where people are encouraged to act on their lowest impulses.

We have no doubt that the Mohegan Sun Corp. has done extensive market research as it prepares to plant the flag in Palmer: The combination of a large demand for gambling facilities, proximity to the Mass Pike, a severely depressed local economy with plenty of people willing to work for whatever wages the gaming industry offers, and an acquiescent state Legislature is irresistible.

But surely we can do better.

Surely government and business can work together to redevelop a local economy in which workers can build a better future, one in which they can take pride, one that will elevate and not reduce them.

In gaming they say "The house (a.k.a. the management) always wins."

The corollary is that everyone else loses. Is this the future we are willing to accept for our community?

Alex Kent and Felicia Sevene live in Amherst.