New Jersey’s attorney general, Atlantic City’s main casino workers union, and the state’s casino industry are all aiming to shoot down a lawsuit filed by a different union seeking to completely ban smoking inside the city’s nine casinos.
The office of state Attorney General Matthew Platkin, the top law enforcement official in Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration, asked a judge to dismiss the suit in a legal filing Monday.
So did both Local 54 of the Unite Here union, which represents 10,000 casino employees in the city, and the Casino Association of New Jersey, the industry’s trade union. They argue banning smoking would force gamblers who smoke to go elsewhere, and the union warned a third of its workers would be put at risk of losing their jobs and the means to support their families.
New Jersey outlawed smoking inside most public places in 2006, but Atlantic City casinos were carved out of the law. Lighting up is still allowed on 25% of gambling hall floors there.
A coalition of casinos workers known as CEASE has pushed for years to end the exemption to the state’s Smoke-Free Air Act, arguing workers’ health is at risk. But a proposal for a ban has failed repeatedly in the state Legislature.
So CEASE and the United Workers Union — which represents dealers at the city’s Bally’s, Caesars, and Tropicana casinos — filed a lawsuit last month against Murphy and the state health commissioner. It argues the loophole in the state’s indoor smoking law is unconstitutional, specially benefitting casinos and denying workers, while specifically benefitting casinos.
But in Monday’s filing, Platkin’s office argued the injunction the workers and union are seeking is “not the appropriate mechanism to challenge a statute that has been on the books for over 18 years.”
The filing also said the exemption does not deny any group of people equal protection under the law because the workers “do not identify any basis to apply a more demanding level of scrutiny than rational basis.”
In addition, the filing said banning smoking would “disrupt the well-settled status quo; likely affect the businesses and livelihoods of third-parties, including the casinos, their management, and the many casino workers who disagree with Plaintiffs’ position; and potentially bring about economic consequences that the Legislature sought to avoid when it enacted the Smoke-Free Air Act.”
The filing comes a few days after Murphy repeated during a television interview that he would sign a bill if one “get to me” and lawyers have told him this issue should be addressed by legislation and not the courts.
“Whether there’s a compromise here, I don’t know,” the Democratic governor said, adding there are “arguments on both sides.”
Pete Naccarelli, a co-founder of CEASE, the group seeking a ban, also criticized Murphy for his, saying the governor “refuses to do anything proactively to advance a bill that would save our lives.”
“Instead, he’s buying the sky-will-fall scare tactics that have been refuted time and time again,” Naccarelli said. “His words are music to the ears of casino executives and Big Tobacco companies, but he’s leaving thousands of us to suffer from the secondhand smoke that is making us sick and even killing us.”
Local 54, which represents hotel workers, beverage servers, baggage handlers, public area cleaners, and other workers the city’s casinos, wrote in its filing Monday that a “total smoking ban would place thousands of jobs at risk, endangering the wages, health, and welfare benefits and retirement benefits” of its members and their families.
Donna DeCaprio, president of Local 54, said Monday a total smoking ban would be “catastrophic” for Atlantic City. She argued between 50 to 72% of all gambling revenue won from in-person gamblers comes from smoking sections.
The union noted that in 2008, when Atlantic City’s City Council imposed a short-lived total smoking ban, casino revenues fell by 19.8%, within the first week, leading to the enactment of the current 25% smoking area on the casino floors.
“We support the health and safety of our members, and believe that improvements to the current work environment must be made,” DeCaprio said. “A balance needs to be reached that will both protect worker health and preserve good jobs.”
Local 54 supports a separate bill introduced earlier this year that would keep the current 25% limit of the casino floor on which smoking can occur. But it would allow smoking in unenclosed areas of the casino floor that contain slot machines and are designated as smoking areas that are more than 15 feet away from table games staffed by live dealers. It also would allow the casinos to offer smoking in enclosed, separately ventilated smoking rooms with the proviso that no worker can be assigned to work in such a room against their will.
Nancy Erika Smith, the lawyer who filed the lawsuit, reacted incredulously to Local 54′s stance against a ban.
“I have never seen a union fight against the health and safety of their members, not once,” Smith said. “Luckily, Unite’s economic arguments, while false, have absolutely no relevance to the constitutional question at hand.”
In its own filing Monday, the Casino Association of New Jersey argued if the court “were to impose an affirmative obligation on the Legislature to pass laws to protect citizens’ safety, then the Court would quickly evolve into some sort of ‘super legislature’ for the general welfare.”
Whether to ban smoking is one of the most controversial issues not only in Atlantic City casinos but in other states where workers have expressed concern about secondhand smoke. They are waging similar campaigns in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, Kansas and Virginia.
Supporters of a ban say going smoke-free would actually attract enough customers to more than offset the loss of smokers who go elsewhere.
Nicole Vitola, a Borgata dealer and one of the leaders of the anti-smoking push, accused Local 54 of being the same as casino management.
“Instead of fighting for the health and safety of workers, Local 54 is battling in a court of law to allow casinos to keep poisoning their members with toxic secondhand smoke,” Vitola said.
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Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on X at @johnsb01.
