The Black Lung of Atlantic City and The Grip On It’s Employees

 

Get Excited

Atlantic City, NJ is teetering on the verge of going up in smoke. The days of the Boardwalk Empire are gone, but with the addition of online gambling and the building of two new casinos the city could be seeing a revival of sorts. A revival that local writer Roger Gros likened to the revival Miami Beach went through since his visit in the early 1990s. He mentions that any town with a beach and a vibrant street lining the ocean can survive. That is, if everyone invested is committed to this change. The boardwalk may start to get friendlier due to the state stepping in with a newly implemented state-ran tourism district. And the greatest sign for the city could be the restarting of the once highly anticipated, now half-built “just get it done” Revel boardwalk casino that has been stalled since the laying off of 400 workers in April 2009. Aside from the casinos, non-gaming attractions have been popping up for years and continue to come up in the city creating new jobs and potentially income generating venues for the city. While these are all signs of hope and revival for the city I grew up near, there are glaring needs that need to be addressed to improve the lives of the people in the city- the people who keep these venues going. Mainly, the people in the casinos who have been locked into a career that has well beyond subpar health conditions for all of their workers. Yet, some of the stakeholders are invested in keeping these conditions in the status quo.

Not counting the casinos that are in process of being built, there are eleven casinos within the city. Atlantic City ranks third in the world for gaming destinations based upon revenue. Yet, when almost half of the states in the United States, twenty-four to be exact, currently mandate 100% smokefree nontribal gaming venues the elephant in the room of Atlantic City becomes clearer: why hasn’t the city joined when the rest of the state has become smokefree? Although the city has ran ten years of profitable nonsmoking poker rooms, casinos still remain at a 25% smoking in their venues. On October 15^th, 2008 the city went with a full-on smokefree environment only to see the current 25% ordinance be set in place soon after. Yet, during the short time of smokefree casinos there were no reported problems and profits were reported at slightly higher rate than what there was the year before. What creates a problem is that the 25% of smoking shares space right next to nonsmoking tables and alternating rows of slots are smoking and nonsmoking. This intermingling of the two creates a blanket of smoke covering more than just 25%. In some circumstances that the two areas are separate, it is still not a hard task for smoke to rise through vents, atriums, and escalators to reach the smokefree areas. Thus, leaving players and employees still breathing in the smoke. Employees are suggested to enforce the rules about smoking at their tables, but management in many of the casinos have been known to have their employees turn a blind eye or potentially face the consequences of being written up or fired. Furthermore, the dealers aren’t even allowed to wave smoke away while at the table, forcing them to inhale the smoke against their will. If they do wave the smoke away they are once again at risk to be written up for their insubordination. Basically, dealers are forced to inhale smoke or potentially be left searching for new employment.

While there are some who will say that these workers choose to stay in this profession there are facts that may suggest that these employees do not only have limited options, but might even be handcuffed to the positions that they are in. Unemployment rates are still in the high single digits to as high as the low-teens in the area. The idea for many of these life long Islanders to move out of the area is only a last ditch option, but it is becoming a more viable option as the years go on. They must stay in the casinos due to the lack of positions elsewhere in the area. While most of the higher paying careers are justly catered to those who have earned degrees in those fields, the pickings are slim for the others looking for work. A quick search of online job sites such as Indeed.com yield results that are more suited for a college student than a family provider looking to support their family. Positions such as “Front Desk Agent (Part-time)”, “Valet Parker”, “Cashier”, and other “General Crew” variety jobs vastly outweigh the full-time jobs. That is not to scoff at those positions and the people working hard at them. Rather, this is just a claim that those positions cannot support a family these days. Therefore, the casinos remain the most dominant work provider. Whether it’s on the casino floor, the bars, or hotels the conditions are not up to the standards other states have laid out for their venues and casinos. In recent years many employees have taken to the idea of going to casinos in other states, choosing to stay in the career but escape the air of Atlantic Cit. Yet, as many of these employees have several generations invested into this community they just can’t see themselves uprooting their families lives to pursue this venture.

While the state has banned smoking in virtually every public building, casino employees remain subject to contracting the “Atlantic City Black Lung” whether they like it or not. When workers who have never smoked a day in their lives are contracting lung cancer there is a time to reevaluate the safety of their environments. At this point, the job market is not even close to booming and many are stuck doing what they are doing or suffer the potential wrath of unemployment. It’s time that one less concern is taken off their minds by returning to them their health and safety for a hard day’s work.