6.08.07
Gaming impasse beginning to thaw
Compacts won't have labor-organizing tool
By James P. Sweeney
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
SACRAMENTO – After months of strategic circling, Assembly Democrats are reaching out to some of the state's most powerful Indian tribes, seeking a compromise that could seal multibillion-dollar gambling deals that have been stalled since August.
Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez, D-Los Angeles, has told organized labor it will not get what it wants in the agreements and is discussing revisions on other issues that could be made without renegotiating the compacts, lawmakers and knowledgeable sources said.
That has spurred intense negotiations over the past week aimed at breaking the long impasse. The Pechanga tribe near Temecula was on the brink of a deal, although an aide to the speaker said nothing had been finalized.
“It's like any legislative discussion,” said Steve Maviglio, a spokesman for Núñez. “They're close. Sometimes you move forward, sometimes you move back. But they're making progress.”
Núñez and Assemblyman Alberto Torrico, a Fremont Democrat who is the speaker's point man on the compacts, have been in talks with the tribes for months. But the negotiations took off after Núñez invited leaders of four of the tribes to lunch in his office Monday.
“We're talking to see what we can work out,” Danny Tucker, chairman of the Sycuan band near El Cajon, said afterward.
A few days earlier, sources said Núñez told state and national labor leaders in a conference call that he would not be able to get their key objective included in the gambling compacts – a collective-bargaining tool known as card-check neutrality.
Labor leaders say card-check neutrality – the ability to organize workers simply by signing up a majority on cards expressing support for a union – is necessary to protect easily intimidated casino employees, who work under surveillance cameras that permit almost constant scrutiny by management.
But the five tribes with pending compacts – Sycuan, Pechanga, Agua Caliente of Palm Springs, Morongo of Riverside County and San Manuel of San Bernardino County – adamantly oppose tougher labor provisions in their compacts, which already permit unions approved through secret-ballot elections.
“Sycuan employees have had the right to organize . . . since our compact took effect in May of 2000,” Tucker told a Senate committee in April. “For the past seven years, no union has made any effort to organize our employees.”
Since California voters legalized Indian casinos in 2000, the state has become the nation's biggest tribal gaming market, with nearly 60 casinos that generated $7.7 billion in revenues last year.
The pending compacts would allow the five tribes to collectively add up to 22,500 slot machines – doubling and in some cases tripling their existing operations – in one of the largest gambling expansions in state history.
In return, the tribes agreed to give the state a larger cut, projected at more than $22 billion over the life of the compacts that would expire at the end of 2030.
The Department of Finance estimates the state is losing nearly $1.3 million every day the compacts are not ratified. But that is a fraction of what the tribes – already among the nation's wealthiest – are losing.
Powerful unions pressed Núñez and his Democratic majority to block the compacts in the fall. After lawmakers reconvened this year, the Senate ratified all five agreements in April, returning them to the Assembly where little seemed to have changed.
Núñez and Torrico, a former union attorney, both came out of the labor movement. But Torrico said that since last year, intervening events narrowed their options.
In February, a three-judge panel of a federal appeals court ruled that tribes must comply with federal labor laws. The opinion against the San Manuel tribe held that Indian casinos should be treated as commercial, rather than government, operations under the National Labor Relations Act.
“The San Manuel decision, in my opinion, basically pre-empts state and local governments from entering into labor relations” with tribes, Torrico said earlier this week. “So even if we were to try to impose some language in the compact, I don't think it would be legally enforceable.”
Moreover, he said, the decision means that tribal employees “have the same rights and protections that any other employee in the country has when it comes to organizing.”
Jack Gribbon, state political director for UNITE HERE, the primary union attempting to organize Indian casinos, has warned that the San Manuel ruling is not final and, at the moment, applies only to San Manuel, which has a contract with the Communication Workers of America.
“We're continuing to work on this,” Gribbon said. “It's enormous sums of money for a handful of tribes. It's tens of thousands of workers with no enforceable right to organize for 23 years. There's a lot of marbles on the table.”
Torrico said he and Núñez still are trying to persuade the tribes to agree not to oppose organizing efforts.
“We're asking them to do it voluntarily, to be neutral when it comes to organizing,” he said.
Torrico said both sides also are exploring whether they can deal with other outstanding issues – such as casino operating rules, enforcement of child and spousal support orders and problem gambling – through a memorandum of understanding outside the compacts.
Others say federal law requires any such state regulation of Indian gaming to be negotiated and outlined in a compact. The tribes are adamantly opposed to reopening the compacts.
“These MOU's or MOA's, whatever they're going to call them, are nothing more than unenforceable promises,” said Cheryl Schmit of Stand Up for California, a grass-roots gambling watchdog.
Sen. Dean Florez, a Shafter Democrat who chairs a committee that held lengthy hearings on the compacts, said he didn't know whether any side deals would be enforceable.
“The key question,” Florez said, “is are these addendums to the compacts or substantial changes to the compacts? We want to know how that works.”
It's also not clear whether all five tribes may be included if there is a breakthrough.
Only the chairmen of Agua Caliente, Pechanga, San Manuel and Sycuan were invited to lunch with Núñez and Torrico. Morongo, which angered Núñez and other Democrats with a multimillion-dollar media campaign urging approval of the compacts, was deliberately excluded.
“I'm not going to talk about that,” Morongo spokesman Patrick Dorinson said of the slight. “There have been discussions, and we think things are moving in a positive direction.”
Núñez also reportedly was incensed that former Democratic Speaker Willie Brown, working as a lobbyist for Morongo, was attempting to peel off Democrats to vote for the compacts.
Núñez alluded to that when he was introduced by Brown at a recent roast of Senate President Pro Tempore Don Perata, D-Oakland.
“Thank you, Speaker Brown,” Núñez said. “Nice to see the casinos could spare you for the evening, or are you still on the clock?”
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