Filled with liquid confidence – with an urge to test your luck – you enter the casino’s shining double doors to embrace the cacophony of bells and yells. You sidestep an overburdened housekeeping cart to grab a drink at the beautiful mahogany bar to your left, before hitting the Pit (gaming floor). The bartender parries your attempted flirtation with a PANAM smile while pouring your drink. Undeterred, you stroll to a nearby poker table and demand to be dealt-in from the dealer who greets you with a beleaguered grin. As you finish your drink, a cute waitress with a strained grin switches your drained glass with a new one. There’s two worlds coexisting in this scene – the glitzy Shangrala promoted by the casino management and the corporeal infrastructure supporting it.
Susan Chandler and Jill B. Jones’ Casino Women: Courage in Unexpected Places (2012) spotlights this second world. In five parts, “Casino Women is an inside, women-focused look into the world of corporate gaming, on the one hand, and the alternative culture of the workers who make it run, on the other” by ascending the corporate hierarchy. (5). It is a ten-year culmination of about 40 oral interviews as well as focus groups with – mainly – Nevadan women about their lives and experiences as casino workers in the (largely unionized) city of Las Vegas as well as (less unionized) city of Reno. Their stories disrupt the gaming industry’s carefully curated mythologies of glamour, mobility, and merit.
Firstly, Chandler and Jones compare the divide between workers designated by their geography within the casino. Workers categorized as “back of house” (BOH) – including maids, laundry workers, porters, janitors, cooks, dishwashers – are mostly female, immigrant, and Latina. They “constitute the vast majority of casino and hotel workers,” serving not only as “the base of gaming’s enormous global empire” but also “fer de lance” regarding unionization. They suffer “long hours at low pay and in jobs characterized by hard labor, high rates of injury, and few if any ladders to advancement.” (18). While mainly invisible from the public, they are highly visible to management. Their predicament sharpens “a keen sense of both power and injustice and a sophisticated understanding of themselves as a group with interests utterly distinct from those of corporate management,” leaving little question as to why three successive presidents of the Culinary Union around 2012 hailed from BOH. (18). Workers categorized as “front of house” (FOH) – including cocktail waitresses – are mostly female, young, and white American. While more visible, their work is equally taxing. Alongside sexual harassment and bodily surveillance, they also “hike many miles per shift [in] the roar and clang of smoke-filled casino floors,” afterwhich they report “being utterly spent at the end of the shift.” (36) This exhaustion “historically limited their participation in community and reform activities,” however the hazards reinforced “a fairly high degree of solidarity and working-class consciousness.” (41). Subjugation, in the gaming industry, is universal regardless of geography but it nurtures an equal and opposite force of solidarity. Secondly, they chronologize the development of mid-20th century grassroots unionization among African Americans – propelled by the Civil Rights Movement – and the changing demographics with the influx of new immigrant communities from Latin America during the late 20th century. Thirdly, Chandler and Jones highlight the consequences of labor rights struggles in the casino industry – both the failures as well as the transformations that blossomed from victories. Fourthly, they climb up the job ladder to illustrate the grass is not always greener the higher one steps. Dealers, despite their positions above cocktail waitresses or housekeeping staff, still suffocate under a state of constant stressful surveillance by the casino and tobacco smoke. For those women in management, these career advancement claims a hefty price including job insecurity, reduced leisure time, and loss of solidarity as they become compliant partners within the casino machine.
I noticed several interesting ways Chandler and Jones employed their oral history interviews. Firstly, they couched their oral history interviews within a lattice of contextual sources. These include union contracts, legal filings, health studies, corporate policy manuals, and interviews with social workers, the latter informed by the authors’ prior experience as social work professionals. A New Zealand ergonomic study and a 2002 Las Vegas-San Francisco study concluding “workload change over the previous five years had greatly increased maids’ odds of pain,” for example, reinforces a housekeeper’s testimony about workplace injury. (21, 23). Under this organization, the oral histories are never freestanding anecdotes, but rather rooted in a material archive. Secondly, they used them to capture trajectories rather than isolated episodes. When introducing subjects, the authors provide ample biographical information mapping their journey to the casino floor and their work life. Thirdly, oral histories scale from individual voice to collective history, as interviews are woven to reconstruct campaigns, strikes, and contract fights. Testimony, in this way, becomes illustrative rather than analytic.
Casino Women demonstrates how union power, class formation, and feminist politics unfold in a service economy built on spectacle. The oral histories disprove the misconception of service work as unskilled or purely “interpersonal”: narrators describe embodied skills (managing a tray on a crowded floor; reading advantage players at a blackjack table), linguistic dexterity (code-switching with patrons and supervisors), and organizational intelligence (interpreting schedules, navigating surveillance, leveraging grievance procedures). Chandler and Jones demonstrate, through this method, the transformation in Las Vegas were not merely outcomes of larger macroeconomic or legal reforms but of remembered and shared experiences that knit together a civic labor culture.
Chandler and Jones offer graduate students two big lessons in oral history usage. Firstly, they show how to pair testimony with non-oral sources without subordinating voice to “the record.” Second, it demonstrates the value of multi-interview longitudinal work, returning to narrators across time to capture change.
Ultimately, Chandler and Jones persuade not only by assembling an archive of women’s voices from the casino floor, but by curating an encounter in which readers must reckon with those voices as knowledge. The book’s limitations—uneven representation across ethnic groups, a relatively light methodological appendix, and occasional stretches where legal or policy exposition outpaces narrative—are outweighed by its originality and craft. For scholars of labor, gender, migration, and the contemporary West, and for practitioners of oral history seeking models of ethical, analytically rich interviewing, this is essential reading.