Matt McCarten: Everyone's a winner at SkyCity, as long as you're the CEO

The love affair SkyCity has with Auckland may be coming to an end. It's hard to remember a time when the tower didn't dominate our skyline.

Some of my Christian mates refer to it as the Biblical tower of Baal, where a vain king once tried to build a tower all the way to heaven to meet God. One old crotchety Christian I know believes it's the modern Sodom and Gomorrah, and the sooner God gets around to zapping some fire and brimstone on to it, the better.

John Stansfield of the Problem Gambling Foundation is more concerned at the social deprivation caused by places like SkyCity Casino. Behind the bright lights, the casino and pokie owners do their best to minimise the downsides of their "entertainment services". I'm not surprised, when $5.5 million profit each day is made by these guys.

Less impressive is the figure that 14 New Zealanders are convicted every day for crimes related to problem gambling. That's 5000 families a year living with that fall-out.

The gambling industry weakly argues that smokers and boozers are destroyed by their addictions, as well. I suppose they have a point, but it does put them in rather dubious company.

Over the last few weeks, I've been advocating on behalf of union members at SkyCity for their employment agreement. Until the past year I haven't had anything to do with SkyCity, but the past few weeks have been an eye opener.

One thing is for sure, SkyCity is a cash cow, rolling in dosh. It has an iron-clad legislated monopoly smack in the centre of town, with a bottomless appetite. Where else can a private company rake in more than $100 million a year with no risk?

Given it's a monopoly I wondered if anyone thought, before they granted the casino owners a licence, whether the local councils should own it.

I wouldn't have minded so much if the money being bled out of the community was going into our city services rather than the pockets of individual shareholders.

I don't think I've ever negotiated with a hospitality service where the net declared profits are bigger than the entire wage bill. SkyCity is in an extraordinary situation where staff members, who receive an average of $30,000 a year, are making their shareholders more than $40,000 each.

As you can imagine, the board of directors can't believe their good fortune and rewarded chief executive Evan Davies with a $1.5 million bonus on top of his more-than-ample salary. His staff wouldn't have minded so much if the rest of the employees got to join the largesse.

The proponents of the trickle-down theory - those who actually believe that if their employer is making bundles they will get a few more crumbs - don't live in the same world most workers live in.

The long-term staff tell me that over the past few years their workloads have dramatically increased and their wages reduced. This has been achieved by SkyCity providing no written job descriptions for any position. Staff tell me this allows senior managers to keep adding jobs to their duties. When that's not enough to increase productivity, there are periodic rounds of redundancies, in which workers have their jobs disestablished. I'm told that very similar jobs are then offered to these "redundant" workers with less pay. For long-serving staff who have held on to original employment terms and conditions, SkyCity just have them unilaterally "capped". This means many long-term staff have not received increases for many years.

The offer from SkyCity to its staff so far in the negotiations is 5 per cent, which is in line with most other workers. But when you consider the CEO's bonus is equal to all 2800 SkyCity staff's proposed increase for six months, it puts it in perspective.

Last weekend when there was a kidnapping of a customer from SkyCity, the PR department went into overdrive, assuring the public it was an isolated event and that security and safety was their priority. They pointed out they had 20 security officers on each shift. Security staff tell me that's not the real picture. When SkyCity opened there were 26 security officers per shift and since then the site has doubled in area, and includes another hotel and a conference centre.

And something has finally cracked. Many of the long-term employees, both managerial and waged, have had enough. They feel they have helped SkyCity make enormous profits over the years and their shareholders and their senior executives have been handsomely rewarded.

The final straw was when the SkyCity management negotiation team told them that while they accepted their concerns, SkyCity can't resolve them to their satisfaction because they had budget constraints.

Union members from SEA-Unite voted unanimously to take strike action. As one of the members said: "Our total claims are less than 1 per cent of this year's SkyCity's profit. I'm sure our customers wouldn't mind that for every dollar they lose to SkyCity, a cent comes to us. After all, it's not like they will lose any more money if we get a pay rise. It just means SkyCity gets 1 per cent less."

Maybe the anti-gambling lobby are right when they say SkyCity is not about entertainment, but about greed. SkyCity likes to have us believe everyone can be a winner. But maybe it should be more than just their CEO.

* Matt McCarten is president of the Unite union.