The monthly state unemployment rate continued its slow decline in July - to 7.7. Two months into the law, it’s unclear how many people have gotten their jobs back. The bill, SB386, became law on July 1 and gives certain employees at hospitality and gaming companies the right of first refusal for their old jobs. The Right to Return was supposed to help, and it may be too soon to know if it has. “People looking for work have discovered that they have power now, more power than they had in the past,” Miller said. It’s also given workers the time and ability to evaluate their own situations, he added. Why hospitality jobs haven’t recovered at the same rate as the demand in the tourism industry is complicated, said Stephen Miller, an economics professor at UNLV.Ĭoming out of the pandemic-induced economic slowdown has some major companies looking at streamlining their workforce and potentially leaning more on automation, Miller said. “I’ve been applying everywhere and there’s a lot of people applying and it’s kind of hard to get a job.” “Right now, it’s really hard,” Arellano said Thursday. The 42-year-old North Las Vegas resident said he began working at Gold Coast as a cook helper in 2013 and was promoted after a few months to his most recent position as a dual stock clerk and receiver.īoyd Gaming Corp., which operates Gold Coast, furloughed and later laid off Arellano last year, he said. Ricardo Arellano is among those still waiting. July marked the fifth straight month that statewide gaming win topped $1 billion, the first time that has happened since 2008. Meanwhile, gaming companies are in the midst of a historic stretch. By April 2020, that number dropped by more than half to 142,000, and it bottomed out in May at 127,000.Īs of July, roughly 70,000 of those jobs had yet to come back. More than 292,000 people worked in the hospitality and leisure sector in Las Vegas in February 2020, according to the U.S.

A large chunk of that can be attributed to the slow rebound of hospitality and leisure jobs that employed more than a quarter of the valley’s workforce before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. In July, Las Vegas had the nation’s highest unemployment rate among major metro areas for the second straight month. (Chitose Suzuki / Las Vegas Review-Journal) the return of big concerts to crowded resorts to record levels of gambling revenue, signs of Las Vegas’ economic revival are hard to miss these days.īut as the state’s economic backbone has surged back to life, the workforce that supports it has yet to see that same rebound. General Manager Adam Wiesberg poses for a photo at El Cortez in Las Vegas, Saturday, Sept.

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