Newly carried out Atlantic Metropolis on line casino union chief Donna DeCaprio ruffled some feathers throughout her first week on the job after she was questioned concerning the ongoing permittance of indoor smoking on the 9 resorts.
Unite Right here Native 54 President Donna DeCaprio doesn’t suppose eliminating smoking on the 9 Atlantic Metropolis casinos makes good enterprise sense. However on line casino employees say their well being is a danger. (Picture: AP)
DeCaprio took the reins of Unite Right here Native 54, the labor union that represents roughly 10K nongaming employees on the metropolis’s 9 casinos, on Wednesday. She is going to oversee the commerce group that negotiates pay buildings for quite a lot of careers, together with housekeepers, cooks, waiters, bartenders, bellmen, and porters.
She changed Bob McDevitt, who served within the position for greater than 25 years. Whereas DeCaprio gained’t want to barter new collective bargaining agreements for not less than one other three years, her tenure begins with a urgent difficulty that must be addressed: indoor cigarette smoking on sections of the gaming flooring.
New Jersey lawmakers are contemplating laws that will extinguish the on line casino smoking exemption supplied to Atlantic Metropolis casinos via the state’s 2006 Smoke-Free Air Act. Meeting Invoice 2151 and Senate Invoice 264 are legislative clones that every search to mandate casinos go solely smoke-free.
Below present regulation, casinos in Atlantic Metropolis can designate as much as 25% of their flooring area for smoking.
‘Suicide Pact’
Throughout an interview this week with the Related Press, DeCaprio was requested the place she stands on the smoking dilemma. She expressed an analogous view to McDevitt, who argued {that a} smoking ban would lead to a 25% discount in annual gross gaming income.
DeCaprio opined that due to Atlantic Metropolis’s proximity to Philadelphia the place casinos additionally allow indoor smoking in designated areas, a smoking ban down the shore “could be a suicide pact.”
A research final yr commissioned by the On line casino Affiliation of New Jersey (CANJ) performed by Pennsylvania-based gaming consultancy Spectrum Gaming Group concluded {that a} smoking ban would lead to as much as 2,500 job losses on the 9 Atlantic Metropolis casinos. The overview moreover forecast that annual GGR would decline almost 11% within the first yr after the casinos could be pressured to go smoke-free.
Whereas that will be dangerous for the resorts and their employees, the state would additionally lose out on as much as $44 million a yr in lowered taxes.
Anti-Smoking Group Responds
CEASE, On line casino Workers In opposition to Smoking Results, got here out arms swinging to DeCaprio likening a smoking ban to suicide.
Indoor smoking is slowly killing us day by day. Between Donna DeCaprio’s insulting description of vital laws to shut the on line casino smoking loophole, her parroting of long-ago debunked business speaking factors on air flow techniques, and her false suggestion of a compromise that’s nothing however the established order, it’s clear that the brand new Native 54 president may be very a lot unaware of the circumstances we cope with at our workplaces day by day,” a CEASE assertion to On line casino.org learn. “Similar to her predecessor, DeCaprio is carrying the water of on line casino executives and Huge Tobacco, spewing false statements which might be anti-worker.”
It’s unclear why the 2 items of laws, each of which have enough help to move by means of co-sponsors, have been stalled by Legislature leaders within the Democratic-controlled authorities. The seemingly perpetrator is that every one 120 seats are up for election this November.
