The union, rep­re­sent­ing about 6,000 non-gam­ing ser­vice work­ers, from room clean­ers to drink servers, is nego­ti­at­ing sep­a­rate but sim­i­lar con­tracts with five of the city’s eight casi­nos — Cae­sars, Bally’s, Harrah’s, Trop­i­cana and Trump Taj Mahal. The Unit­ed Auto Work­ers rep­re­sents deal­ers and relat­ed work­ers at three of those casi­nos. Their con­tracts are not being nego­ti­at­ed, but UAW lead­ers have asked mem­bers not to do any work nor­mal­ly per­formed by strikers.

Just as the casi­nos of Atlantic City gear up for a des­per­ate­ly need­ed big influx of gam­blers over the long Fourth of July week­end, thou­sands of casi­no work­ers who are mem­bers of UNITE HERE Local 54 may be putting their chips on a red spot marked ​“strike.”

“A strike is like­ly at one or more of these prop­er­ties,” Local 54 pres­i­dent Bob McDe­vitt said ear­li­er this week. ​“The real fight in Atlantic City is keep­ing the mid­dle class in the gam­ing industry.”

After nego­ti­a­tions through­out Wednes­day night, the union announced that it had reached a ten­ta­tive agree­ment with Cae­sars Enter­tain­ment, which owns three of the prop­er­ties where con­tracts are expir­ing on Thurs­day night and cov­er 4,000 UNITE HERE workers.

The local econ­o­my depends heav­i­ly on the gam­ing indus­try and, con­se­quent­ly, on the sta­ble, ​“mid­dle-class” incomes that union­ized work­ers have won.

Gam­ing — as the gam­bling busi­ness prefers to call itself — revived this fabled but fad­ed New Jer­sey ocean­front resort town start­ing in 1978 when the first casi­no opened. Rev­enue peaked local­ly at $5.2 bil­lion in 2006, then col­lapsed dur­ing the Great Reces­sion to $2.9 bil­lion at the industry’s nadir in 2013.

Dur­ing that rough peri­od, four casi­nos closed, and 10,000 gam­ing and hos­pi­tal indus­try jobs dis­ap­peared. Work­ers who had been at the top rate for 12 years gained only 80 cents an hour, and over­all wages stag­nat­ed around an aver­age of $11.74, as pri­vate equi­ty firms took con­trol of the casi­nos and demand­ed that the fair­ly well-union­ized work­force take con­ces­sions as they faced increased workloads.

To take one exam­ple, Don­ald Trump launched his Trump Taj Mahal in 1991. He declared the casino’s first bank­rupt­cy only 18 months lat­er. With the third bank­rupt­cy cor­po­rate raider Carl Icahn bought a large share of the casino’s debt, which made it pos­si­ble for him to take con­trol by 2014 with the fourth bank­rupt­cy. Icahn per­suad­ed the bank­rupt­cy court to elim­i­nate the work­ers’ health care, pen­sions and sev­er­al oth­er con­trac­tu­al benefits.

Last March a union sur­vey found that 33 per­cent of work­ers had no health insur­ance, while half relied on gov­ern­ment-sub­si­dized insur­ance. Icahn saved about $8 mil­lion dol­lars a year in pre­mi­ums, as the cost shift­ed to work­ers and the pub­lic. The squeeze of stag­nant wages and ris­ing costs pushed many work­ers near bank­rupt­cy and left oth­ers with­out any pro­tec­tion if ill­ness struck.

Top man­agers and investors did much bet­ter than the work­ers, whose loss­es fund­ed their boss­es’ gains. For exam­ple, exec­u­tives at Cae­sars Enter­tain­ment (which owns three Atlantic City casi­nos) asked share­hold­ers to pay the top 1 per­cent of the com­pa­ny — about 600 exec­u­tives – $50 mil­lion in bonus­es for 2016, accord­ing to McDevitt.

“Peo­ple aren’t going to work for ten years with no raise,” McDe­vitt said in a press con­fer­ence. ​“These peo­ple are ready to take action….These pri­vate equi­ty firms are suck­ing the mar­row out of this city’s bones. If they put a bull­shit con­tract on the table, they’ll get a strike. It’s their choice.”