Press of Atlantic City – More than four months after the launch of Internet gambling in New Jersey, operators in the developing industry are approaching their first deadlines for creating jobs in the state. Regulators are requiring that by May 1, all platform providers base their teams working on customer service, fraud detection and accounting in New Jersey. Rather than the gambling industry jobs of the past, which included cocktail servers, dealers and other service and hospitality positions, the jobs of the future will be more technical, dealing with activity from behind computer screens.
Exact numbers of how many Internet gambling-related jobs have been created to date and what those numbers will grow to by May are unavailable because providers haven’t been given specific quotas, though some speculate the number will be in the hundreds within the year.
Industry advocates champion the future of the industry, one they say could position New Jersey as a central hub of the market and bear more than 20,000 jobs.
“It’s still so early that no one has really taken a tally of jobs to date,” said William J. Pascrell III, a New Jersey lobbyist who advocated for Internet gambling. “New Jersey has already elapsed Nevada and Delaware’s markets, and we’re just scratching the surface. If New Jersey becomes a hub, the numbers will go up exponentially.”
State Sen. Jim Whelan, who is co-sponsoring a bill that would encourage that hub status by allowing international online gambling companies to operate out of New Jersey, still cautioned that eye-popping job numbers cannot be the state’s expectation from the industry.
