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In Sunday's Star-Ledger, we took a look at challenges and opportunities in Atlantic City in light of a spate of pending casino closures and a renewed push to bring casino gambling to the Meadowlands.

Today, we speak to Deborah M. Figart, a labor economist and professor of education and economics at the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Figart, who lives in neighboring Ventnor City, has been performing ethnographic studies of casino workers for nearly a decade. She is the co-author, with Ellen Mutari, of the upcoming book "Just One More Hand: Life in the Casino Economy."

Q: How did you start examining Atlantic City’s casino industry?

I started out interviewing workers. I wanted to do a study of workers in the industry, and I started out in 2006 at the peak of the market in Atlantic City. The more and more workers I talked to, and the more I tried to tell the workers’ story — from the local economy perspective, and then the New Jersey economy, the national economy, and then the global gaming market — the more the market was changing out from under me.

The book took eight years, much longer than any of my other books. But that’s because the story has kept evolving over time, and it has become a much more difficult and sadder story to tell.

Q: What are the long-term implications of these impending closures?

We don’t know when it’s going to end. We don’t know if the four casinos are definitely going to close after the summer. But we’re talking about potentially thousands of people out of work.

And here’s why it’s important for Northern New Jersey, the region and the rest of the industry: The first thing that’s going to happen is that employees who are still there are counting their days that are left.

So those families are going to cut back on their spending, and they’re going to behave as if they’re living in a recessionary environment. We have been trying to come out of the Great Recession for eight years, and we started growing again and it’s really sad that this is happening now.

So these employees are going to cut back on their spending, and it will affect local business first. It’ll affect where they go out to dinner, maybe they won’t send their kids to summer camp. It’s definitely going to affect, when they lose their jobs, the local dry cleaners, the local nail salons — businesses like that.

But, you have to remember that these casinos, they have vendors. You have 10- to 15,000 businesses, mostly in New Jersey but also nationwide, that are registered as vendors, as businesses supplying these casinos with goods and services. So those businesses are going to start losing revenue. And those businesses, all over New Jersey and the region, are going to start tightening their belts.

And those vendors, they do business with other companies in New Jersey and throughout the nation, so the ripple effect is eventually going to hit them.

So, you take one city like Atlantic City, and you throw a pebble in the water, and you watch those ripples. Those ripples are going to reach to northern New Jersey and to the rest of the country. It’s going to hurt.

Q: Some industry analysts have said that the closures are just a sign of the market adjusting to existing demand, and that thinning the herd is good for business overall. Do you agree?

Well, I can understand that. Certainly one perspective is that there’s a certain size of the Atlantic City market, and let’s say it’s one or two billion dollars, and if we have eight casinos instead of twelve, the same business will be spread among eight instead of twelve.

That assumes a zero sum game. Before we had competition from Pennsylvania and Maryland and Delaware, we had an almost $6 billion market. So you can’t just assume that a market is a fixed size and that’s it.

I do think that there’s going to be a net job loss and business is going to be engaged in trying to capture more of the market, whatever’s left, but they’re going to try to capture more of the market with fewer employees.

It’s already difficult to get a full-time job in Atlantic City, and a living wage. Most of the jobs are part-time now, and that has hurt families.

The key engine for economic development is jobs. Without good jobs, you don’t have people thriving in the community and spending money in the community and helping business in the community and the state.

Q: Is Internet gaming helping the casinos? Has that been a net benefit or has it taken business from the brick-and-mortar facilities?

If you look at the revenue numbers, you see that Internet gaming is bringing in millions that wasn’t there before. It’s attracting customers, and there’s money coming in from it. How much money is new money versus money for people that don’t get in their cars and travel to the casinos, I don’t know.

I do know that the investment houses in New York City are downgrading their rosy projections for Internet gaming. It’s not turning out to be the boon that they projected it would be for the gaming companies.

As a labor economist, I’m concerned about jobs. Internet gaming is going to produce a few living wage, middle-class jobs in sustaining servers, and doing computer code, and programming and Internet security. But it’s going to sacrifice some of the jobs of the hardworking people that have made a career for themselves on the gaming floor — the dealers, the cocktail servers.

Q: What’s your perspective on the non-gaming aspect of the city’s economy?

The smart, entrepreneurial and creative people and the marketing people that are working on this are doing the right thing. Cities that have diverse economies, that are not a one- or two-industry town, those cities tend to do very well and prosper — even in times of recession.

I’m all for trying to increase the size of the non-gaming pie, but not just hospitality and tourism. I think we should try to creatively pursue light manufacturing. I think we should ask our politicians why the off-shore wind farm has been stalled in Trenton. Because we could have light manufacturing, repair and construction of wind farms.

There’s lots of little precious gems and secrets, from agriculture to light manufacture, hospitality and tourism, all over the state. To the extent we can promote those kinds of businesses, that would be terrific.

Q: What do you make of the proposal to bring casinos to the Meadowlands or Jersey City? What could that mean for Atlantic City’s take of gambling revenue?

I think it’s got to be studied. As an economist, I would say give me a cost-benefit analysis. Show me the data and let us all look at it.

The policy makers have a tough decision to make: If they put gaming in northern New Jersey, that’s a huge decision. The intent of the original referendum in 1976 was for urban redevelopment, and to promote jobs and grow the profile of Atlantic City. That was the promise back then.

Q: And was that promise fulfilled?

Well, if you look at the peak, in 2006, those were very good days in Atlantic City. And we’ve had a downward trend since 2006. It was a secular trend because of competitive gaming on the East Coast, and it was a cyclical trend because the Great Recession hurt everybody.

Then we started clawing our way back, and then came Superstorm Sandy, and there are local businesses that have never come back, and property owners that are still hurting.

We’ve gotten a one, two, three punch in the last couple of years, and it definitely affects the rest of the state.

(This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity)