Casino Worker victim of All-Star Weekend Crowd

A casino slot employee has been dismissed after remarks he made about customers during the four-day NBA All-Star Weekend. Bruce Schowers, casino employee for almost 30 years, was fired from his position as a slot floor person at the New Frontier. He sustains that his only fault was saying where he worked. And for this he thought they might suspend him for a week, but they instead chose to fire him.

Now Bruce is looking for another job in the casino industry with good insurance in order to help his 16-year-old son who is in need of epilepsy medication and his wife who is collecting Social Security disability. Schowers, 55 years, is concerned that his savings are not enough.

The firing from the New Frontier, where he had worked since 1995, took place at a few days after All-Star Weekend. Mike Nelson, the New Frontier's Human Resources Director, didn’t want to comment on this particular situation because of personnel confidentiality requirements.

For Schowers, his firing is evidence that management don’t care much for the employee. It is more concerned with the customers than the employees who are on the front line every day. "Managers are always more concerned with the customer support," Schowers said. “They have no way of knowing what we go though on a daily basis."

Schowers' remarks were only a few sentences in a front-page story discussing the effects the four-day weekend had on tourists, law enforcement and the tourist industry. In fact, he was speaking about the behavior of the people that were there. But it seems that the human resources personnel were afraid that people won’t come to the casino after his statement. Interviewed with Schowers for the story were Clark County Sheriff Doug Gillespie, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, two tourists and spokesmen from an airline and the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.

The casino employee first sent a letter to the editor describing what he and co-workers had observed during the weekend. But the Review-Journal, who quoted him, received almost 100 letters that day, most of which were critical about the crowds and problems associated with the NBA All-Star events. The editorial department didn’t cite from his letter. They called him for a 15-minute phone interview about his experiences at this event.

In the story, he called the fans "the rudest group of people I've ever experienced." Also, he mentioned "Some of the girls were afraid to wait on the crowd” because there were a few instances of violence at the New Frontier and at least one instance of a customer showing a gun to a cocktail waitress.

Schowers said he was called at home on the day the story was published, his free day, and was told to meet with the human resources manager the next day when he came to work. At that meeting, Schowers sustained that he only disputed the accuracy of one event. He said he only heard about the gun incident mentioned in the story and anyway, the incident happened at another property.

He said he was told at the 30-minute meeting that he was not even allowed to talk to the media or air his opinion about guests because it creates a bad image for the company. In his favor, Schowers said he told management “whole weekend put a bad image on the city. So I don't see how it negatively made the Frontier looks.”

After being suspended, he was finally fired in a meeting that he said lasted two minutes. On his firing announce was wrote: "Willful misconduct - making false, vicious or profane statement about a customer or a guest, fellow employee or the company."