A friend dropped this nugget on me at a party. Apparently it’s because they’re a pretty strait-laced and moral lot and therefore ideal employees. My Google-fu isn’t great today.
First off, it’s not exactly legal to be asking someone their religion on a job application, right?
Next, I did a quick online search for “What percentage of the population of Las Vegas residents are Latter-day Saints?” The result I got from University of Las Vegas is 6%. Wiki tells me the total population of Las Vegas is 641,903. 6% of that number is 38514 (assuming my calculation is correct). Doing a search for “How many people work in Las Vegas casinos” sent me to a ChatGPT answer of 150,000. That is four times the total population of Latter-day Saints in the city.
Given that latest calculation, I’ll have to say it’s another urban legend.
He seemed pretty sure, but you’re right that it would be unverifiable without actually checking in person.
They’re right because the numbers just don’t add up.
Sadly, you didn’t have the time to run those searches on the spot. And even if you did, you’d’ve likely got the response of, “You can’t trust everything on the Internet”. But the size of the industry population being four times the size of the LDS population is kind of telling, IMHO.
I don’t know about “most”, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the fraction of casino employees who are LDS is considerably higher than the fraction of LDS in the general population.
For one thing, the percentage of LV that is Mormon is three times the national average.
Also, casinos and LDS institutions (aka, BYU) have long had similarly strict grooming standards for employees. Until fairly recently, it was common in both for mustaches to be banned.
Finally, it’s right next door to the heavily Mormon state of Utah.
These articles indicates that:
- LDS bankers have historically been financial backers of Vegas casinos, and helped support legislation which led to Vegas’s growth
- Howard Hughes, when owned several Vegas casinos, preferentially hired Mormons, at least for his personal staff in Vegas, and to manage his casinos
- Many Mormons do work in the casinos; gambling is apparently frowned upon, though it isn’t forbidden in the way that alcohol and caffeine are
Are they commuting daily from all over Utah?
I figure that they find it easier to move from Utah to LV than if they lived on the East Coast.
In 1855, the Mormons built a fort midway between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles. It was a place for travelers to rest and re-stock supplies.
The city was founded in 1905, and officially incorporated in 1911. Since a lot of its trade came from Salt Lake, a large percentage of its population was Mormon. It still had a large Mormon population in 1931, when Nevada legalized casino gambling.
The question was whether most of the casino workers were Mormon, and unless there is a secret second city under Las Vegas consisting almost entirely of Mormons, the answer is no.
Las Vegas has a very large LDS community. Has had since the early days. After Salt Lake City it’s the single largest concentration of LDS folks anywhere. Or at least was back in the 1980s-90s when I lived there.
Having said that, across the whole USA the LDS folks’ absolute numbers and percentage of population are not large. Mormons are a tiny minority on a national scale. And even if concentrated e.g. 10x in Las Vegas, it’s 10 times a very small number yields a still-small number.
Do a hefty fraction of Mormons work in the casino industry or the casino support industry? Sure. And more than one might suspect from their strait-laced image. A hefty fraction of all Las Vegans work in those industries. Are the Mormons a hefty fraction of those industries? Not really. At least not when I was there.
Precise data is hard to come by, but that ChatGPT figure of nearly 1/4 of the city’s population working in casinos seems dubious.
Las Vegas has a pretty diversified job base, though a fair percentage of those jobs especially in service industries are dependent on casinos and tourism.
It wouldn’t surprise me if quite a few Mormons worked hotel or restaurant jobs in places that also have gambling, so technically casino employment. I doubt that many are dealing blackjack or spinning roulette wheels.
So maaaaybe?
Mole-mons?
Still an interesting historical site.
It isn’t necessary for the casino workers to be residents of the city of Las Vegas (population 642,000). Most of the large famous casinos aren’t even inside the city limits of Las Vegas, they’re in the nearby unincorporated town of Paradise (population 191,000). Many casino workers live in the nearby cities of Henderson (population 320,000) or North Las Vegas (population 217,000) or the unincorporated town of Spring Valley (population 216,000). The population of Clark County is over 2.25 million, though parts of the county like Bullhead City are too far away to commute.