Atlantic City union completes sweep of new labour deals as NYC competition looms

Earlier this week, Atlantic City’s primary union UNITE HERE Local 54 agreed to a new labour deal with Bally’s Atlantic City, completing the latest round of negotiations with all nine of the city’s casino properties. All of the deals, including Bally’s, are for one year.

The short contracts are another indication of the general uncertainty plaguing the market as it contends with rising competition from both the burgeoning New York City casino market as well as New Jersey’s sizable online gaming industry. Most casino labour deals run for three or more years — the last round of negotiations was in 2022.

“We are proud of our negotiating committee, our members and our staff who stood up and fought to maintain and improve the contractual pay, benefit and employment standards that make these jobs good union jobs,” Local 54 President Donna DeCaprio said in a statement.

With regard to New York, a one-year pause on negotiations might give a clearer picture as to what the competitive landscape may look like. Resorts World NYC is currently the lone casino operating in the market, and is averaging about $30 million per week in gross gaming revenue through its first three months. That would pencil out to about $1.5 billion in GGR for a full year from just one property. For comparison, Atlantic City’s nine casinos generated $2.8 billion in GGR in 2025 and $1.5 billion in the first half of this year.

While Resorts World is cause for concern for AC, the other two licencees, Metropolitan Park and Bally’s Bronx, could be farther off than previously thought. Both are projecting single-phase openings in 2030, but Metropolitan Park was behind schedule as of the spring and Bally’s is struggling to finance its project, tabbed at $4 billion. The development projections could change next year.

‘Blue Sky’ or ‘Stress’ for Atlantic City?

This week’s shortened labour agreements came alongside the release of a startling new economic report for the region. The Greater Atlantic City Casino-Hotel Employment Exposure Assessment, released Tuesday by the Atlantic County Economic Alliance, posited that more than 8,000 jobs could be lost to NYC competition by 2035 under a “Stress”, or worst-case, scenario. That would represent more than a third of Atlantic City’s casino workforce given the current staffing levels of about 21,100.

Lesser scenarios, such as the “Central” scenario that the report adopts, projects some 5,100 jobs under exposure. The best-case, or “Blue Sky” scenario, would see about 1,500 jobs under exposure. Current employment levels are the lowest in nearly a decade, researchers said, and are currently below even the lowest totals in the aftermath of the Covid pandemic.

The report considered five factors in its analysis, but only included four in its model:

• Competition from the three New York casinos
• A potential recession in the US economy
• Potential in-state expansion from new casinos at the Meadowlands and Monmouth Park, although those efforts have been rejected in the past and will not go before voters in 2026
• Further expansion at the two in-state tracks with convention and hotel complexes (this was named but not modeled)
• Competition from in-state online gambling

“This analysis is an exposure assessment, not a prediction,” wrote Dr. Max Slusher, who compiled the report. “It does not say that a specific number of jobs will disappear on a specific date. It asks a planning question: how much of Atlantic City’s 2025 bricks & mortar casino-floor revenue base is exposed if several pressures land on the region at the same time?”

The iGaming debate

The external threat of NYC competition is coupled with the internal growth of New Jersey iGaming. Atlantic City casino revenue is still keeping pace with online revenue, but the consistent double-digit growth rates for iGaming have sparked debate about revenue cannibalisation for several years.

Online revenue in New Jersey was $2.9 billion in 2025, representing the first year in the state’s history that iGaming posted more revenue than retail casinos. Through July, online revenue is at $1.8 billion, a 14.5% increase over last year’s pace, which was itself a record.

Detractors of cannibalisation argue that iGaming is a growth engine for the industry as a whole, as overall statewide gaming revenue is soaring to new records. That said, AC casinos are still facing challenges — in the first half of 2026, for example, operating profits fell 15% from the same point in 2025 despite higher revenue.

“The casino hotels encountered their highest second-quarter costs and expenses in nine years, significantly constraining reported gross operating profits,” James Plousis, chair of the New Jersey Casino Control Commission, told Casino.org.