Atlantic City Casino Union Boss Likens Smoking Ban to Economic ‘Suicide’
Newly implemented Atlantic City cassino uniting leader Donna DeCaprio ruffled some feathers during her first off week on the task after she was questioned almost the ongoing permittance of indoor smoking at the 9 resorts.
DeCaprio took the reins of Unite Here Local 54, the dig conglutination that represents around 10K nongaming workers at the city’s ennead casinos, on Wednesday. She will supervise the craft mathematical group that negotiates pay structures for a variety of careers, including housekeepers, cooks, waiters, bartenders, bellmen, and porters.
She replaced Bob McDevitt, who served inwards the role for more than 25 years. While DeCaprio won’t demand to negotiate unexampled collective bargaining agreements for at least another tercet years, her incumbency begins with a pressing military issue that needs to live addressed: indoor cigarette smoking on sections of the gaming floors.
New island of Jersey lawmakers are considering lawmaking that would get rid of the casino smoking immunity provided to Atlantic Ocean City casinos through and through the state’s 2006 Smoke-Free Air Act. Assembly Bill 2151 and Senate Bill 264 are legislative clones that to each one seek to mandate casinos go game entirely smoke-free.
Under current law, casinos in Atlantic City can designate up to 25% of their story place for smoking.
‘Suicide Pact’
During an interview this week with the Associated Press, DeCaprio was asked where she stands on the smoking dilemma. She verbalised a similar sight to McDevitt, who argued that a smoking censor would ensue inward a 25% reducing inward yearly porcine gaming revenue.
DeCaprio opined that because of Atlantic City’s law of proximity to Philadelphia where casinos also countenance indoor smoking in designated areas, a smoking forbidding pile the shore “would live a felo-de-se pact.”
A work last year commissioned by the Casino Association of New Jersey (CANJ) conducted by Pennsylvania-based gaming consultancy Spectrum Gaming Group concluded that a smoking forbidding would resultant in upwards to 2,500 job losses at the niner Atlantic Ocean City casinos. The brushup additionally calculate that yearly GGR would diminution nearly 11% inwards the first off yr after the casinos would follow forced to move smoke-free.
While that would follow forged for the resorts and their workers, the country would also lose come out on upwardly to $44 jillion a yr in rock-bottom taxes.
Anti-Smoking Group Responds
CEASE, Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects, came come out arms swinging to DeCaprio likening a smoking ban to suicide.
Indoor smoking is slowly killing us every day. Between Donna DeCaprio’s insulting verbal description of decisive legislation to closelipped the cassino smoking loophole, her parroting of long-ago debunked manufacture talking points on ventilation systems, and her mistaken prompting of a via media that is cypher but the position quo, it’s straighten out that the young Local 54 chair is really a great deal unaware of the circumstances we deal with at our workplaces every day,” a CEASE financial statement to Casino.org read. “Just the like her predecessor, DeCaprio is carrying the water of cassino executives and Big Tobacco, spewing off-key statements that are anti-worker.”
It’s unclear wherefore the deuce pieces of legislation, both of which experience tolerable reinforcement to pass on past way of life of co-sponsors, get been stalled by Legislature leaders in the Democratic-controlled government. The likely culprit is that all 120 seats are upwards for election this November.
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