The bitter labor dispute engulfing Trump Taj Mahal
spilled onto Pacific Avenue on Friday as union supporters picketed outside the
property, which could become the fifth Atlantic City casino to close this year.
Supporters of Local 54 of UNITE-HERE chanted “No health
care, no peace!” as they picketed in the shadow of the shuttered Revel
Casino-Hotel and Showboat Casino Hotel.
The union says Taj’s bankrupt parent, Trump Entertainment
Resorts, has decimated the health benefits of about 1,100 Local 54 workers
during a Chapter 11 reorganization ostensibly aimed at keeping the Boardwalk
property open past November.
Local 54 spokesman Ben Begleiter said he can’t rule out
the possibility of a strike at the Taj.
“There’s nothing off the table right now,” he said
Friday.
“If this is going to escalate to striking or anything
like that, then that’s a decision the workers at Taj Mahal will make” by
voting, he said. “We currently don’t have a plan for a strike vote. But things
are moving very rapidly.”
Last week a federal judge nixed the union’s collective
bargaining agreement with Trump Entertainment Resorts, giving the company the
go-ahead to replace pensions with 401(k) plans and union health insurance with
coverage obtained through the Affordable Care Act.
The company says those and other court-approved changes
will save Trump Entertainment $14.6 million annually. The union says they
amount to a 35 percent pay cut.
Union workers are furious with Trump Entertainment’s main
lender and Taj’s de facto owner, Carl Icahn, who they say has orchestrated an
assault on union benefits that threatens workers across Atlantic City.
Local 54 says benefit cuts at the Taj will spread like a
contagion all over the city as other casinos look to bring their labor
contracts in line with the new low set at the Taj.
“I wish (Carl Icahn) could understand the decision of the
judge. It’s not only for our company, which is bankrupt ... but it’s going to
impact 10,000 other people in the city,” said Taj bartender Bart Rodgers, of
Galloway Township.
Homemade union signs on Friday caricatured Icahn, who
controls about $286 million in first lien-debt secured by Trump Taj Mahal and
the closed Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, as everything from a corporate vampire
to a Wall Street pharaoh.
But on Friday, Icahn, who owns Tropicana Casino and
Resort, cast himself as a savior — someone who invested heavily to bring that
Havana-themed property back from the brink of closing and who is standing by
his pledge to invest $100 million in Trump Entertainment if the state chips in,
too.
Trump Entertainment says it will keep the Taj open in
November but needs millions of dollars in tax relief and grants to keep it up
and running indefinitely. State Senate President Stephen Sweeney has repeatedly
vowed to fight the state-aid request, calling Icahn a corporate predator who
preys on workers.
Paul Smith, a cook at the Taj, wore a wolf costume to
underline that point Friday.
“I’m portraying the Wolf of Wall Street: Carl Icahn,” he
said, adding that in decades of working in the casino industry, the labor
changes at Taj represent “by far the most serious attack on the union” he has
seen.
In a statement reported Thursday, Icahn said, “The Taj
Mahal is quickly running out of money and will almost certainly close.
Reprehensibly, the Union, instead of working with, and trying to help, the
company to keep the Taj Mahal alive, is instead doing everything to destroy the
possibility of saving the jobs of almost 3,000 employees.”
Source: Press
of Atlantic City
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