Right to work — without work cards

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Friday, Feb. 15, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Chris Morris

The work card, a little loved and much hated remnant of the days of the mob, is about to face a big challenge from union organizers.

The Bartenders Union and the Culinary Union are beginning to lay the political groundwork for lifting the burden of costly background checks for work cards required of about 3,300 union bartenders.

Decades old, the work card signifies that Las Vegas police have performed a criminal background check and found a person eligible to work in Clark County.

What bothers the union is that the $45 for the work card isn’t the only fee bartenders pay every five years. In 2004, the state’s Gaming Control Board began demanding that bartenders who work in establishments with a gaming license fork over $75 more, plus $15 for fingerprinting, for an additional background check.

That’s $135 just to get a job.

“It’s not just Big Brother. It’s worse than Big Brother,” said Terry Greenwald, secretary-treasurer of Bartenders Union Local 165.

Within the next few months, with the help of the Culinary Union, Greenwald will urge local politicians to eliminate one or both of the background checks for bartenders.

County Commissioner Chris Giunchigliani said she welcomes getting rid of the cards altogether because they have “basically become a way to boost someone’s budget.”

Neither the city nor the county receives money directly from the work card program. That money goes to Metro Police, which Thursday could not immediately provide information about how much revenue the cards generate.

However, with Metro issuing roughly 10,000 cards a year, the $45-per-card fee would produce $450,000 in revenue, minus administrative expenses.

“It’s pretty arbitrary,” Giunchigliani said of how the police decide who can and cannot have a card.

More than arbitrary, Greenwald said, it’s costly and redundant because 99 percent of his union bartenders work in casinos, which “do much more extensive checks as a matter of course.”

Not everybody thinks the cards are a bad idea. City Councilman Gary Reese is among those who regard the work cards as a valuable security measure that helps screen out potential problem employees.

“Anything we can do to help alleviate problems that may arise, I don’t have a problem with that,” Reese said.

When asked whether employers would willingly hire bad people, necessitating the government’s intervention by way of background checks, Reese chuckled.

“There’s many (employers) who would do that,” he said.

An increasing number of opponents, though, dismiss the program as not simply paternalistic, but also a way for local government to get into the pockets of workers even before they get a job.

As Giunchigliani notes, the convictions, legal woes and other problems turned up in the review for a work card typically would have been discovered by employers in their own examination of an applicant’s background.

Moreover, if an employer is willing to take a chance on someone with a shady past, critics say, does the employer really need government warning him that he might be about to hire someone with a predilection for slipping his hand in the till?

Allen Lichtenstein, general counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada, can’t hide his distaste for a system that he says is “a pure revenue generator, plain and simple.”

The mob and its early foundation in Las Vegas are a big reason the cards exist. “It started off with wanting to make sure that casino workers did not have ties to organized crime ... to dispel the idea that somehow there was mob influence here,” he said.

From there “it just kind of snowballed and governments started demanding cards for all kinds of occupations,” Lichtenstein added.

The ACLU fought hard against the cards, helping to eliminate from the county’s work card list maids, bellhops, desk clerks, room service waiters and their supervisors in 2001.

Occupations that require the cards differ in Las Vegas and in Clark County. Depending on where you work, cards are required of security guards, carnival workers, strippers, locksmiths, mobile food vendors, outcall promoters and entertainers, pawnbrokers, property managers, child care workers and “peddlers, solicitors and temporary merchants.”

One ugly outcome of the work card process unfolds occasionally in the chambers of City Hall when people who have been denied work cards plead with the City Council for mercy.

Though Metro Police issues more than 10,000 work cards annually, roughly 380 applications are denied after a police investigation turns up criminal offenses that amount to “moral turpitude,” or behavior that runs counter “to community standards of justice, honesty or good morals.” Those factors include outstanding arrest warrants, extensive criminal backgrounds, previous work card revocations and providing false information.

Of those 380 applicants, fewer than a dozen appeal to the City Council, with the card seeker usually showing up with an employer who attests to his good work habits and character.

That typically is followed by council members, through invasive personal questions and demands of reassurance that the person won’t do bad things, forcing the applicants to make a humbling public plea to be trusted.

“Sometimes when a council person asks these questions, I just roll my eyes,” Councilman Reese said.

Hulking men break down in tears. Men and women, without prompting, feel obligated to lay out embarrassing details of their personal histories.

For Steve Alberts, going before the City Council to beg for the right to work was “worse than court.”

“Court wasn’t on TV,” as council meetings are, noted Alberts, who won a work card through an appeal in January after having been denied one because of a 2006 conviction on conspiracy to avoid taxes.

“I mean, I’m fit enough to have custody of my daughter, but they sat there to see if I’m fit enough to hold a job?”

At the county level, similar hearings are held in private.

If Greenwald and the Bartenders Union get their way, public or private, they will become a thing of the past — at least for bartenders.