Uruguayan casino union condemns ‘secretive’ online gambling talks and lack of collective bargaining

Uruguay’s National Association of State Casino Workers (Anfuce) has denounced the absence of meaningful collective bargaining in a major workforce reconversion process and criticised the way online gambling regulation is being discussed “under secrecy” between casino authorities and private banks.

Uruguay’s National Association of State Casino Workers (Asociación Nacional de Funcionarios de Casinos del Estado, Anfuce) has declared a conflict with the country’s casino administration over what it describes as a breakdown in social dialogue and opaque policymaking around online gambling. In a statement issued this week, the union said that there is no genuine framework for collective bargaining on the labour changes tied to the transformation of the gaming sector, and warned that workers are being excluded from decisions that will directly affect their jobs.

Anfuce argues that the problem became clear when the latest budget proposal for the Directorate General of Casinos was submitted, introducing structural changes to operations and job categories — including the elimination of grades in pay scales — without prior negotiation with what the union describes as the most representative organisation in the sector. According to the association, this confirms that the current casino leadership “does not respect collective bargaining and does not listen to any of the workers’ proposals”.

The union is particularly alarmed by how the debate on online gambling regulation is unfolding. Anfuce claims that casino authorities, together with representatives of the private banking sector, are preparing a new project to regulate online gaming “under secrecy”, without transparency or worker participation. It insists that any initiative to authorise or reorganise online gambling must be treated as a single, coherent system, with clear objectives and a unified exploitation model in which the State plays a central role.

Union leaders stress that staff in state casinos have years of experience not only in running land-based casino games, but also in preventing problem gambling and monitoring money-laundering risks — areas that are supposed to be priorities for the regulator. Excluding these workers from the design of the new online framework, they warn, undermines the quality of the future system and “puts at risk the very source of employment” for public-sector gaming employees at a time when digitalisation is reshaping the industry.

Anfuce has already asked the Ministry of Labour to intervene, but says those meetings have yielded little progress and accuses casino management of maintaining “total hermeticism” around the government’s online gambling plans. The union is now considering escalating measures, including a nationwide strike with casino closures around the year-end holidays, if no open dialogue mechanism is established in the coming weeks.

The dispute comes as President Yamandú Orsi’s administration prepares to relaunch the debate on online gambling regulation, after a previous bill collapsed in the Chamber of Deputies in 2022. Industry stakeholders and lawmakers are pushing for a modern framework that can capture tax revenue, protect consumers and bring offshore operators into a supervised regime — but the Anfuce conflict highlights the risk of moving ahead without a social consensus on how to manage the transition for public-sector workers.