Work card reform is priority

Erin Neff

Friday, Feb. 2, 2001 | 11:36 a.m.

Workers rights groups, casino management and civil libertarians have been complaining about work cards for 25 years.

Now three separate reform movements hope to reign in an unwieldy system that everyone admits has gotten out of control.

The cards, issued by Metro Police after a background check that the prospective worker must pay for, are required for gaming, child care and adult entertainment professions.

The problem is that the permits also are required for busboys, waitresses, maids, ice cream vendors and other workers. And when Metro finds an old arrest in a person's background, that can often be grounds to deny the right to work.

Two legislators are hoping to reform the system even as a local communitywide reform effort initiated by Mayor Oscar Goodman has landed squarely back in the hands of Metro and government officials.

So even if reform proposals or legislation will have a positive effect on workers, many will feel left out of the process.

Goodman created a "blue ribbon committee" last year to try to build consensus on how to change work card requirements. Representatives of the city, Clark County, Metro, the American Civil Liberties Union, Catholic Charities, the Culinary Union and the Interfaith Council for Worker Justice joined together.

The committee either fell apart or split off into a quasi-governmental group, depending on whom is asked.

"The committee is defunct," said Mike Slater, director of the Interfaith Council.

Metro Undersheriff Richard Winget said the group met a few times, but that sessions "got so bogged down in discussion we just couldn't get anything done."

Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU, said nothing got done because government officials didn't want to deal with the underlying and thorny issues raised by work cards.

"The process broke down because neither Metro nor other government officials were willing to talk about the constitutional issues implicated in the work card system," Peck said.

Even as the grass-roots portion of the committee tried to bring people back to the table for discussions, Metro Lt. Stan Olsen was already meeting with state Sen. Maggie Carlton, D-Las Vegas, and a police official from the Reno area to try to come up with uniform standards.

Now Olsen's group is poised to make recommendations about which jobs should be taken off the list of those requiring work cards.

"It took quite a while to get through this because it's a tangled mess," Olsen said.

But with the help of city and county licensing officials, Olsen said his group was able to eliminate certain job classifications from the list of those requiring work cards.

The recommendations would eliminate jobs such as busperson, waiter, waitress, casino landscaper and karate instructor from the list. Kitchen workers and valet parkers also would be removed from the list.

But maids, ice cream vendors, bartenders and cocktail waitresses would still have to get work cards. Olsen's group did not touch child care and adult entertainment requirements, or address jobs regulated by the state such as dealers and security guards.

"The idea was let's fix what we can fix and move on," Olsen said. "From some people's perspective, it was all or nothing."

Allen Lichtenstein, an attorney representing the ACLU, says that exact picking and choosing of jobs on a list fails to address the overall Constitutional issues governing citizens' right to work.

"Before we could go through the list and say this one's in, this one's out, we told them you have to have standards," Lichtenstein said. "We asked all the governmental agencies what the proper Constitutional standard was.

"They said they'd tell us at the next meeting," he added. "But they would not come back to the table."

Olsen said the group couldn't continue with the ACLU constantly arguing the process was unconstitutional, and with Lichtenstein and Peck threatening to sue.

Goodman said Thursday that many of the jobs requiring work cards came about willy-nilly when some official, for example, would read a newspaper clip "about an ice cream vendor in Oshkosh who exposed himself to children. Then they said, 'we can't have that here.' "

Earlier this week Goodman met with Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie, D-Reno, who discussed her proposed reform of the gaming work card system.

"My initiative is creating a statewide gaming card with standards for background checks and costs," Leslie said.

Currently each jurisdiction statewide has its own regulations. Casino workers in Reno who get a job in nearby Sparks have to undergo a new background investigation just to change jobs.

And the cost charged workers for those investigations varies from nothing in one small, rural county to $74 in Washoe County. Clark County charges $35, but Leslie said Metro does not conduct the same level of background checks that Washoe does.

"Metro only does a local scope, not state or FBI," Leslie said. "Someone with a felony conviction in Reno could go to Vegas, and they would never know."

As a result, some of the larger casino properties have begun doing their own background checks.

Winget said police would definitely get more information if they expanded their checks, but he added since the system is not automated, applicants would have to wait for months to get results of FBI fingerprint analysis.

Leslie's proposal would drive up the cost for background checks in Clark County, but she said, work cards would be good for five years and transferable to different jobs.

"The last thing I want to do is hurt the poor change person," Leslie said. "I don't want to hurt the people at the bottom of the food chain. I'm doing this to help workers."

Leslie also has had an initial meeting with the Nevada Resort Association in hopes that casinos would front some prospective employees the cost of the investigation provided they paid the money back from their paychecks after being hired.

Carlton's legislation would reform work cards for nongaming positions, in a manner very similar to the recommendations Olsen's group have made.

"There's no consistency out there so we need to set some standards," Carlton said.

Although she has not yet completed her proposal, Carlton said it may include standards by which police can issue a work card despite past criminal behavior.

Arrests might be allowed, provided the person was not convicted of the crime. And people with convictions might be granted cards if the conviction was more than seven years old, she suggested.

"We have to be very careful how we word this," Carlton said. "I still don't know how to write it."

Peck said the ACLU will support any efforts by legislators to reform the system. But he said he would still like the mayor's committee to get back together to work through the issues.

"There are some very significant, difficult issues," Peck said. "The Constitution actually has to be taken into account in any work card discussion.

"Unfortunately this appears to be another case of Metro and the government arrogantly presuming that they can do whatever they like regardless of what the law requires."