Casino Workers Unionize, Can’t Get Contract

Posted by Tula Connell to AFL-CIO NOW Blog

Marybeth Litcholt has worked as a casino dealer at the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City since 1987. After 21 years on the job, she makes $9 an hour.

Meanwhile, her über boss, Donald Trump, the chairman and largest single shareholder in Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., which owns the Trump Plaza, made $32 million in 2007. Trump’s approximated net worth is more than $3 billion.

Given that Trump & Co. hadn’t shown a willingness to pay even longtime employees more than near poverty-level wages, Litcholt and other employees there voted in March 2007 to join the UAW by a margin of more than 2-to-1. Wages weren’t the only problem: They needed a strong union like the UAW to negotiate a fair contract to provide basic workplace safety standards, a decent wage, pension and health care. Despite working 40-hour weeks, many can’t afford health care for themselves and their families.

But despite the overwhelming vote for the union, Trump has refused to take the next step and bargain a contract. In fact, his corporation filed objections to the election—objections that were even thrown out by the generally anti-worker Bush National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). The legal wrangling delayed union certification for more than a year, and Trump may still challenge the decision in federal court.

Last weekend, Litcholt and thousands of other casino workers and their supporters marched and rallied through Atlantic City in protest. The problem isn’t just Trump Plaza. Management at several casinos have refused to negotiate with casino dealers who recently have joined the UAW. And the even bigger problem is that after any worker joins a union, there is nothing in U.S. labor law that requires employers to reach a contract agreement. Nothing. (Check out photos from the rally here.)

So the rally last weekend was about corporate greed and how that greed is decimating America’s middle class. It was about changing labor laws by passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. And it was about Litcholt and Aneil Patel, a 14-year employee at the luxurious Caesars Atlantic City, and their struggle to support themselves and their families. Patel also joined with other casino dealers to sign up with UAW, yet he and his co-workers can’t get a contract. Says Patel:

“Even if you do a good job and they like you, you can never earn a decent base pay.”

Patel can’t afford dental or eye care for himself or his twin boys.

“When it comes to health care, I have to gamble myself.”

New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, Sen. Robert Menendez and several members of Congress joined AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and other elected officials and union leaders at the rally. Sen. Barack Obama sent a letter of support to the workers that Menendez read to the crowd. Obama’s letter said in part:

“I encourage the employers in the gaming industry and the UAW negotiators to come together and to recognize that work should be rewarded with a few basic guarantees, such as: quality, affordable health care when you get sick; fair treatment in the workplace and wages that can raise a family; and a dignified and secure retirement.”

Atlantic City is home to 11 casinos that employ more than 30,000 people, the vast majority of whom are represented by a union. So why has it now been so difficult for casino dealers to get first contracts?

Big money makers like Trump don’t give anything to their employees just out of the goodness of their billionaire hearts. (That’s why we still need unions.) But when such hegemons swim in a culture of corporate greed, like the one sanctioned over the past seven years by the Bush regime, the corporate sharks get thicker and thicker and the rest of us are just dinner waiting to happen.

Harrah’s Entertainment, parent company of Caesars, and Patel’s ultimate employer, released a statement in advance of the rally saying the company:

“[W]elcomes our good AFL-CIO union partners and their President John Sweeney to Atlantic City. We are proud of our long history as a great employer and our proven record of partnership working with numerous unions in Atlantic City and around the country.”

Eh. If Harrah’s management really was so well-intentioned, the casino dealers would have a contract by now. And they wouldn’t have experienced threats and intimidation from their managers when they tried to form a union. Patel says the company forced the workers into mandatory meetings where casino workers were told that a union would not be in their best interests. And the NLRB wouldn’t have issued a summary judgment against them for refusal to bargain with the UAW.

Such concerted hostility against unionization is all too common at U.S. workplaces. Studies show 92 percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda and 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions.

Passage of the Employee Free Choice Act also would help address such employer harassment.

Obama has promised to sign the Employee Free Choice Act if he becomes president. He was among dozens of Senate co-sponsors of the bill last year, which passed the House but failed to be voted on in the Senate. Throughout the rest of the year, we in the union movement are aiming to get 1 million signatures supporting passage of the Employee Free Choice Act, and we will present them to the new group in town next January. (Hope you can take a minute to sign the petition here.)

It’s always helpful to see how others view us. In the case of how our nation is seen in terms of the way corporations, hand in hand with the Bush administration, treat employees, it’s not a pretty picture.

Chun Zhu started working as a dealer at Bally’s Atlantic City casino more than three years ago. Since then, his wages have not risen and his benefits have shrunk. Chun and a large majority of casino dealers voted to join UAW. But he’s stunned that their rights under U.S. labor law are not being upheld. All they want, he says, is the same respect that management already has extended to the thousands of other casino workers whose contracts have been honored. Chun wants his voice—and the voices of more than 1,000 of his co-workers at Bally’s—to be heard.

Wondering aloud whether he still lives in a dictatorship, he asks:

“This is freedom?”