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Casino workers, with the help of United Auto Workers, are fighting to close the loophole that allows for indoor smoking. Threatening job losses, the industry and other unions want to keep it

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Walk into Live! Casino in South Philly on a Saturday night, and the smell of cigarettes hits you immediately. The Clean Indoor Air Act prohibiting smoking in Pennsylvania establishments passed in 2008, but casinos remain a notable loophole — one of the last bastions of the old, vice-friendly service industry. They’re open 24 hours, they’re always serving drinks and they’ll do everything in their power to keep their customers from stepping outside, even just for a moment.

Photo by BLT Architects courtesy of Visit Philadelphia.

Smoke permeates the casino floor to such an extreme extent that workers say local painters and carpet companies, who are frequently tasked with covering up smoke damage, are actively invested in keeping the smoking loophole in place for fear of losing out on business. One slot attendant at Harrah’s Philadelphia describes repairing machines that failed to pay out. Inside each slot machine is a bill validator with a delicate sensor that reads the money it receives. Generally, when a machine needs fixing, the sensor is the problem. “There’s ash all over, so the sensor can’t read the bill,” he said. “When I say a lot of ash, I mean, it’s almost like someone got an ashtray and just dumped it in there.”

Although 20 states have outlawed indoor smoking entirely, the loophole persists in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. More than 1,300 venues are exempt in Pennsylvania alone, but during the pandemic, all of that changed. Gambling takes a real toll on the health of those who become addicted, making them easy pickings for the likes of COVID-19. A state-sponsored study in Massachusetts this year found that although problem gamblers account for only 9.9% of the population, they’re responsible for 90% of casino revenue. They also tend to have health problems that would put them at a higher risk of hospitalization should they catch the virus: a 2005 study found that problem gamblers were at an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease and peptic ulcer disease.

A 2009 study found that 60% of people with a gambling addiction are smokers.

And then there’s the smoke. A 2009 study found that 60% of people with a gambling addiction are smokers. Secondhand smoke is known to not only cause heart disease, strokes and lung cancer but also aggravate many preexisting health problems. Casino workers say that, for years, they’ve watched coworkers who never smoked a day in their lives develop lung cancer.

In the initial flurry of COVID-19 regulations, casinos were shut down entirely, and when they reopened in June 2020, it was with a mask mandate. Smokers were asked to step outside, which was a welcome reprieve for long-suffering casino employees.

The “silver lining to COVID [was that] the fresh air came,” said Jennifer Rubolino, a table games dealer in Pittsburgh. Rubolino had been working as a teller in off-track betting for years and moved into casinos because she liked working with people. The smoking aggravated her asthma, though, and she had to seek a special health dispensation.

“Many of us haven’t had to deal with secondhand smoke in our workplaces, maybe for 20 years or more, but for casino workers and other hospitality workers that have been left behind, this is still their daily nightmare,” said Bronson Frick, director of advocacy at Americans Nonsmokers’ Rights Foundation. Establishments that go nonsmoking, he said, see “literally overnight improvement in public health outcomes.” A 2023 poll found that 74% of Philadelphia-area adults were more likely to go to a casino if it was smoke-free, suggesting that business could actually increase if the loophole were closed.

Unfortunately, that poll hasn’t played well with industry executives. “If [the casino] had their way, they wouldn’t want you to get up and go to the bathroom,” said Nicole Vitola. Vitola has been working in casinos for 27 years, first at the Golden Nugget (then Trump’s Castle) and now at the Borgata in Atlantic City. She’s also the cofounder of Casino Employees Against Smoking Effects (CEASE), a coalition that began in Atlantic City and has since expanded to seven states, including Pennsylvania.

As the vaccine made its way around the country in 2021, smoking returned to casinos. “I panicked,” Vitola said. “I couldn’t believe that they were just going to resume as usual.” After a sparsely attended boardwalk rally sponsored by an anti-smoking organization, Vitola founded CEASE because she felt the messaging would be more effective coming from the affected employees themselves, who understood the tricks of the trade better than outside advocates. “Everybody hates the smoking,” said Lamont White, a CEASE member, who has worked as a dealer in Atlantic City for 35 years.

The casinos are “diabolical,” said Mike, a dealer at a casino in Philadelphia, who previously worked in Atlantic City for 18 years. When smoking did return to A.C. casinos, it was the Fourth of July weekend, he explained, which is an especially busy time for the city. All the rooms were booked well in advance, so bringing back smoking that weekend allowed the casino to argue that business was better with the loophole in place, establishing a false precedent that would help them fight the clean air campaign they knew was coming.

Tricks like these, Mike says, are standard across the casino industry. According to the smoking loophole, 75% of a casino floor needs to be smoke-free. “There are sections of the casino that only open on weekends, which is [when] they do the bulk of their business,” he said. “So if you go in there any random weekday, the entire wing of the casino that’s closed is the nonsmoking section. That entire area over there, with no games open? That’s a nonsmoking section.”

Mike, a dealer at a Philadelphia casino, says the management exploits loopholes and plays tricks with sales statistics to make smoking seem indispensable to the business. Photo by Chris Baker Evens.

In January, New Jersey State Assemblyman William F. Moen Jr. introduced a bill that would ban smoking in New Jersey casinos, but as of this writing the bill was still sitting in the Senate committee. Frustrated with the lack of progress, United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents dealers at Bally’s, Caesars and Tropicana, filed a lawsuit in April arguing that the smoking loophole was at odds with casino workers’ constitutional right to a safe workplace. The judge disagreed, ruling that “reliance on a constitutional right to safety is not well-settled law.”

For now, the judge’s ruling represents a major win for the casino and tobacco industries — when it comes to casinos, Atlantic City sets the standard on the East Coast — but workers are pressing forward with the campaign despite the headwinds. Assembly Republican Whip Brian Bergen chided legislators in mid-November after the Tourism, Gaming and the Arts Committee once again failed to add the smoking bill to the agenda, calling it “an insult. There is enough support from both sides of the aisle to advance this bill … Casino employees have waited long enough for a healthy workplace.”

Another anti-smoking bill has been languishing in limbo in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives as well. State Representative Dan Frankel of Pittsburgh argued against the smoking loophole when the Clean Indoor Air Act was passed in 2008, and ever since he has been looking for a way to close it. In 2023, he introduced a bill that would ban smoking in all Pennsylvania casinos; it passed the House and will likely be considered by the Senate in 2025.

“It’s inexplicable to me that businesses like these casinos would put their employees in a position where their health is jeopardized,” said Rep. Frankel. “I don’t get why they aren’t even voluntarily moving in this direction in order to protect the health of not just their employees, but their patrons as well … The science is indisputable with respect to how secondhand smoke impacts people’s health.” He pointed out that Parx Casino — which is just outside Philly in Bensalem, Bucks County — banned smoking some time ago and is consistently listed as the most profitable casino in the state.

“We were worried that when we didn’t have smoking and the competition did that we’d see some loss in revenue,” said Marc Oppenheimer, chief marketing officer of Parx. “What we saw was some loss of players. No question, there were some people that went to the competition, because we were nonsmoking, but there were other people that started coming to us because we were nonsmoking. The net effect ended up being very little impact on revenue, but our employee morale went way up. Our customer satisfaction scores went up, because one of the five biggest [complaints] we had always had was the building smells too much like smoke.”

Eliminating smoking also presented other, less obvious benefits, Oppenheimer said. The casino is no longer switching out the carpet to keep the smell of smoke at bay, nor do they have to replace slot machine seat covers pockmarked with cigarette burns. Even the machinery functions better, and chips and cards no longer need to be replaced due to smoke residue. “It’s been four and a half years since we did our last carpet change,” he said.

According to a 2022 National Health Interview Survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), conventional tobacco use has been steadily declining, and 11.6% of the population smoke cigarettes. Even some of the organizations that initially lobbied for the smoking loophole in 2008, such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) posts, are now lobbying to close it, arguing that the loophole puts pressure on qualifying businesses to allow smoking inside for fear of losing customers. “While the Pennsylvania VFW respects the rights of veterans to smoke, we also respect the rights of the many more veterans who do not smoke,” said Dwight Fuhrman, department commander of Post 8896 in East Berlin, Adams County, in a 2018 statement. “We want to attract and support not only veterans of all ages but also their family members.”

Casino executives in Atlantic City have argued that they’ll lose business to Pennsylvania if they ban smoking. “An immediate and complete smoking ban, while smoking is still permitted in casinos in Pennsylvania, against the backdrop of an already weakened and worsening economic climate, would hurt working-class people, endanger tens of thousands of jobs and jeopardize the millions of dollars in tax revenue dedicated to New Jersey seniors and people with disabilities, as validated by multiple independent studies,” Mark Giannantonio, executive director of Resorts Casino and the president of the Casino Association of New Jersey, told New Jersey Monthly in June. Even UNITE HERE, the union that represents bartenders, servers, room attendants and other casino workers, has argued in favor of keeping the loophole in place. When Donna DeCaprio took over as president of UNITE HERE Local 54, she described a smoking ban in New Jersey casinos as “a suicide pact,” arguing that it would result in job losses. She told WHYY that 50% to 72% of in-person gambling revenue came from the smoking sections.

The UAW — which has been representing CEASE casino workers in court, although they are not UAW members — has argued that the Local 54 should be protecting their workers’ health rather than the interests of casinos. UAW officials announced in September that they would be leaving the New Jersey chapter of the AFL-CIO because of what they characterized as gross negligence.

“Six other unions came out against us, to fight us to keep smoking in the casinos,” said Ray Jensen Jr., assistant director of UAW Region 9. “The AFL-CIO is supposed to be a mediator … They refused to even get us a meeting with the other unions … They just basically abandoned us and let our workers suffer from secondhand smoke.”

Workers are getting sick and getting diagnosed with cancer and emphysema … It’s crazy for them to keep saying, ‘Now’s not the right time.'”

— P.J. Naccarelli, dealer at Borgata Casino, Atlantic City

Most casino jobs are union, which is what makes them so attractive. The service industry is marked by volatility, and casinos offer stability, job security, good wages and seniority for longtime workers — a rarity in an industry where employees are often pushed out as they age. But the dealers aren’t covered by a union; they earn a tipped minimum wage, which is currently $2.83 an hour in Pennsylvania. This makes the casinos’ concerns about business lost over closing the smoking loophole particularly frustrating for dealers. As most of their income comes from tips, they’re just as invested in keeping the tables busy as casino executives, and these companies are paying them next to nothing to risk their health. “We’re still willing to fight against having smokers in there,” said Vitola. “We’re more fearful of our health and not being able to work.”

While waitresses and slot attendants can sometimes manage to pass through the smokiest areas of the casino quickly, dealers are chained to the table. “We can’t walk away,” said P.J. Naccarelli, a dealer at the Borgata in Atlantic City. Customers are “elbow to elbow with us, staring at us, blowing smoke directly into our faces. We can’t even turn our heads, because we have millions of dollars of chips in front of us at any given time. People who don’t frequent casinos don’t understand.” Vitola has two children, and worked through both her pregnancies.

Whatever the outcome, casino workers say they’ll keep fighting. They don’t have a choice; their lives are at stake. A competing, compromise bill, which would continue to allow smoking in unenclosed areas of a casino but stipulate that no worker could be assigned to an enclosed smoking room against their will, was dismissed outright by Jensen. “UAW will never compromise on our workers’ health and safety. What’s going to happen is nobody is going to volunteer, and then the lowest seniority person is going to get ‘voluntold,’” he said. “And if they refuse, they’re going to get sent home and they don’t get to work. They’re making a choice between their health and a paycheck; that’s not fair.” UAW recently launched a campaign featuring the children of CEASE workers talking about their concern for their parents’ health.

“We know people are dying,” said Naccarelli. “Workers are getting sick and getting diagnosed with cancer and emphysema … It’s crazy for them to keep saying, ‘Now’s not the right time.’ If I had the opportunity to save someone’s life, would I say, ‘No, you know what? It’s not the right time for you. I’m not going to save you, I’m going to just ignore it.’”

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