Macau gaming role accreditation good idea: labour group

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Either an employee-licensing or professional accreditation system for Macau-casino operational roles would be good ideas, if challenging to implement, suggested a local labour group representing younger workers, in comments to GGRAsia and referring to a recent industry survey. What or who might be responsible for such a system was not addressed in the narrative.

The labour group – the Macao Association of Young Employees in the Gaming Industry – had commissioned Macao Polytechnic University’s Centre for Gaming and Tourism Studies to conduct a survey gauging gaming 

employees’ thoughts on the licensing-accreditation topic.

Benjamin Loi, association president, told GGRAsia: “It is our aspiration that a professional accreditation system would eventually boost the quality of service and professionalism” of the industry’s employees, and aid service quality within the sector, he suggested.

An actual employee-licensing system might take Macau down a new regulatory road, acknowledged Macao Polytechnic University in its findings summary.

The survey was conducted in July and August, drawing 519 respondents: more than half of them already employed in the gaming sector for more than 10 years.

The results published this month, showed that 343 individuals – or 66.1 percent of respondents – were in favour either of licensing or a professional accreditation system for gaming-operations jobs.

Of the other 176 respondents, about three quarters “did not have much understanding” of those concepts, according to the wording of the survey results.

The industry staff quizzed were drawn respectively from the table games, slots, marketing, casino cage, and surveillance departments, and 

 worked either as table game dealers, pit managers, slot attendants, or administrative managers.

Even an accreditation system by itself would require “cooperation and consensus” involving the government, the gaming operators and the sector’s staff, acknowledged Mr Loi.

His association is said currently to have more than 1,000 members, with the majority said to be in either middle- or senior-manager positions within the operations of the city’s six gaming licensees.

Training courses for casino- and hospitality-sector professionals have been a long-standing element of Macau tertiary education.

As of the third quarter, Macau had circa 71,000 employed in the gaming sector, including gaming promoters – the local term for licensed junkets – according to the latest available data from the city’s Statistics and Census Service. The figures are based on data reported via the industry’s 

employees. The tally represented 19.2 percent of Macau’s employed workforce, making gaming the largest sectoral employer.

The third-quarter median monthly earnings for gaming sector employees was MOP20,500 (US$2,544), second highest amongst all sectors, the census service data show. Employees in the financial sector had the highest median monthly earnings in the same quarter, at MOP22,000.

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