Tropicana’s New Owners Get Chance to Treat Workers Fairly, and More Bargaining News
Will the new owners at Atlantic City’s Tropicana casino reverse the previous owner’s anti-worker practices? Get this and more updates here from the “Bargaining Digest Weekly.” The AFL-CIO Collective Bargaining Department delivers daily, bargaining-related news and research resources to more than 1,100 subscribers. Union leaders can register for this service through our website, Bargaining@Work.
NEGOTIATIONS
UAW, Tropicana: Members of the UAW at Atlantic City casinos stated that new management at Tropicana has the opportunity for a 180-degree turnaround from past illegal practices and should begin fair negotiations for a first labor agreement.
“It’s hard to believe that a company run by a judge would break the law, but that’s what the National Labor Relations Board is telling us,” said Eric Knuttel, who has been a dealer at Tropicana for 27 years. Tropicana has been administered under a conservatorship by former New Jersey Supreme Court Justice Gary Stein since December 2007, after previous owners lost their license to operate the casino.
$3 Million for Super Bowl Ad. $3 for Workers Who Paid For It
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| Liberian rubber workers walk for miles with heavy metal buckets of rubber on their backs. |
Nearly 100 million football fans across the country will be tuning in to watch Bruce Springsteen belt out his trademark songs celebrating America’s workers during halftime at the Super Bowl this evening. They also will see two new 30-second commercials—estimated to cost at least $3 million each—from Bridgestone Firestone, the world’s largest tire company and the halftime sponsor.
But none of the viewers will see Austin Natee and his fellow workers. Natee is president of the union that represents the thousands of Liberian rubber workers who earn $3 on a good day, but whose hard labor creates the profits that Bridgestone Firestone uses to pay for the halftime spectacular.
When he was in Washington, D.C., last year to accept the 2007 Meany-Kirkland Human Rights Award on behalf of the rubber workers, Natee explained how Bridgestone Firestone continually exploits workers and pollutes the environment. Saying the workers live in modern-day slavery, he explained that rubber tappers work 14 hours a day and must tap 750 rubber trees and accumulate 150 pounds of latex daily—all for little more than $3 a day and a monthly 100-pound bag of subsidized rice if quotas are met.
