The company said it "overwhelmingly" affected management positions

MGM lays off 557 employees in a 2nd and last round of its 2020 cost-cutting plan

Thursday's letter, signed by MGM Resorts International CEO Jim Murren, said this would be the final round of cuts.
2019-05-31
Reading time 2:44 min
In a letter signed Thursday by CEO Jim Murren, MGM says impacted employees will receive a two week non-working notice period during which health care and other benefits remain intact. Under a program called "MGM 2020," the firm announced the first wave of layoffs impacting 254 managers. MGM Springfield saw a decrease of nearly 700 since the casino opened last summer.

MGM Resorts International confirmed it will let go of 557 employees in a second and last round of layoffs at the company. A letter from CEO Jim Murren was distributed Thursday to employees regarding the changes. The company says that everyone impacted will receive career services and that yesterday’s eliminations are "overwhelmingly management positions," FOX5 reported.

Impacted employees will also receive a two week non-working notice period during which health care and other benefits remain intact, and two weeks of severance for every year of service, up to 26 weeks for salaried and 13 weeks for hourly positions, according to Marc Jacobson, MGM manager of corporate media relations.

Thursday's letter, signed by CEO Jim Murren, said this would be the final round of cuts. "I stand behind the decisions we have made and believe them necessary to assure our future, but I deeply regret the impacts they have on individuals and their families," he said in the letter.

Back in January, MGM announced plans to reduce costs to help grow the company in a program called "MGM 2020." Then in April it announced the first wave of layoffs impacting 254 management positions. In addition, another 222 positions were eliminated incrementally after that, for a total of 1,033. The company, which has about 77,000 employees, is the largest employer in Nevada.

MGM Springfield

Speaking to reporters last week after presenting the numbers to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission, MGM Springfield President Mike Mathis said the company ramped up its hiring ahead of the opening in August. But he said the casino then slid into some slower months for gambling. MGM Springfield's workforce dropped to about 2,300 as of the end of March. That's a decrease of nearly 700 since the casino opened last summer.

Mathis said the employee numbers will increase as special events are added this summer, but it's all about "fine tuning" the business. "We're driving a bunch of overtime right now, because we're a little bit understaffed," Mathis said. "So there's a correlation between staffing and overtime. We're providing higher-quality jobs — perhaps not as many as we originally thought."

Mathis said a company-wide cost-cutting plan called MGM 2020 has had a "negligible" impact on the job numbers in Springfield. Taking into account "vendor" employees, MGM said 2,384 employees work at the casino site.

The company said it experienced 38 percent turnover in 2018, and 16 percent so far in 2019. Some employees were fired for performance issues, while some are taking other jobs — including at the new Wynn Resorts casino opening in Everett in June.

MGM was required by its deal with Springfield to try to have 3,000 total employees when the casino opened. But the deal was silent on whether that requirement continued afterwards. Springfield City Councilor Mike Fenton, who chairs the city's casino oversight committee, said that flexibility was intentional.

"Given the nature of their business, and given surrounding competition that may or may not materialize over the next few years, it's natural that we would expect a fluctuation in their employment figures," Fenton said.

MGM was required by its deal to begin operations with 2,200 employees in full-time positions. MGM told regulators it had 1,767 at the end of March.

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