MGM's Aria Resort & Casino in Las Vegas (archive)
Photo: Ethan Miller / AFPAccording to a newspaper report, the casino operator MGM Resorts wants to part with 18,000 employees who are already on leave in the USA. The company will begin the layoffs on Monday, reported the Wall Street Journal.
Employers are legally obliged to give employees on leave a termination date if they are not called back to work after six months, wrote CEO Bill Hornbuckle. "Unfortunately, August 31st is the date of the separation of thousands of MGM Resorts employees whom we were unable to bring back."
MGM Resorts is struggling with a decline in business due to global travel restrictions in the wake of the corona pandemic. The downsizing equates to roughly a quarter of the 68,000 U.S. employees the company had before the pandemic.
The cuts particularly affect the gambling city of Las Vegas: while around three and a half million visitors usually visit the city each month, in April and May, when the casinos remained closed, there were only several thousand.
Only half the casino capacity allowed
MGM is the largest operator of casinos on the Las Vegas Strip - and has been struggling to refill its rooms and casinos since it reopened in June. Only half of the capacity is allowed, the number of visitors has increased to 1.1 million. However, two of the MGM casinos remain completely closed, one in Las Vegas and one in New York. The company is therefore also cutting jobs across the country.
"Although we have safely resumed operations on many of our properties and brought tens of thousands of our colleagues back to their workplaces, our industry - and our country - is still affected by the pandemic and we have not yet fully utilized our operating capacity" said Hornbuckle in a memo to staff.
MGM also suffers from the low occupancy of its hotels, also due to the lack of congress guests: The hotels in Las Vegas were only 43 percent occupied, less than half compared to a year ago. Accordingly, rooms in hotels like MGM Resorts' MGM Grand and Caesars Entertainment Inc.'s Paris were available for dumping prices of less than $ 50 a night.
Icon: The mirrorcaw / AFP / Reuters
