Gamble Pays Big

AFSCME dealing a fair hand at publicly owned Iowa casino.

ALTOONA, IOWA

First, the citizens of suburban Polk County coughed up $64 million to buy and remodel the place. That was in 1991, when the privately owned Prairie Meadows Recetrack and Casino here fell into bankruptcy and the county supervisors approved the $64 million municipal bond issue to bail them out.

Next, a sprawling pari-mutuel slot machine parlor was added to the grounds. Today, the gussied-up warehouse is filled with twinkling lights, clanging bells, food courts and other embellishments favored by gamblers.

The dream was to plunk a prolific cash cow in the middle of a fast-growing suburban area in the shadow of metropolitan Des Moines.

It worked beyond anyone’s fondest wish.

Today Prairie Meadows is the nation’s only county-owned casino, an around-the-clock, 365-day-a-year fantasyland for bettors. One of only 12 legal gaming establishments in the Hawkeye state, it gushes $4 million to $5 million into the county’s strongbox monthly.

The fountain of money builds schools, pays public employee salaries, and improves the lives of almost everyone in Polk County.

All except Prairie Meadows workers, that is.

A LITTLE FAIRNESS. "We need fair wages," says Grace Lisowski who, for nearly a year, stood in the employee parking lot to hand out AFSCME organizing literature to the 1,300 Iowans working at the casino and racetrack.

"For a place that makes millions and millions of dollars a month," she hotly observes, "you shouldn’t have people here working full-time [who are so poor] they’re able to qualify for food stamps and welfare."

"But they are," says Lisowski, who is paid $7.75 an hour running a taco and beer stand in the casino hall. That’s $16,120 a year in full-time work in a state where average personal income is $20,600. Nationally, personal income averages more than $32,000 a year.

"We’re a non-profit public organization," says the 48-year-old taxpayer and voter, "and a lot of our money goes to do a lot of good in the community. But for somebody to work full-time and need food help for her kids — oh, no, I don’t buy that.

"Charity begins at home," Lisowski believes.

Partly in response to that intolerable unfairness, in 1996 a group of line workers, including Lisowski, Jerry Dowell and others, "got to talking" about things like pay and the odd-ball working conditions at the casino. They soon realized they needed someone to teach them how to speak up and maybe get a union going.

The problem, from their perspective, was a patronizing management team that threatened workers who dared to question pay and practices.

It didn’t help, either, that while Polk County owned Prairie Meadows, its day-to-day operation was in the hands of an unelected, secretive board, independent of political authority.

From the start, the Racing Association, as it’s known, fought the idea of collective bargaining. And it never included workers in discussions of work rules, pay grades, and other administrative processes governing work life at Prairie Meadows.

"Everybody was afraid," Lisowski recalls. The word was that if workers showed up at union rallies in front of the casino or distributed flyers, they could get fired.

But her husband, Gerald, who works in a downtown Des Moines pharmacy, and son Ricky, 20, an amateur boxer, encouraged her to stick to her principles.

"My husband," she fondly says, "always taught me, if you believe in something bad enough, fight for it."

"What’s the worst thing they could do to you?" she muses, "Fire you? I’d find another job. So, I went for it, working with my new friends at Council 61 to build a better life for the people who bring so much money into this county."

WORK RULES. "Wages are not the biggest concern," offers Jerry Dowell, 45, a slot machine attendant who works in the same hall as Lisowski.

"The ‘point system’ is completely unfair," according to the father of three who makes about $9 an hour, or $18,720 a year for a 40-hour week.

A worker penalized nine points in a three-month period is fired, according to Dowell. But the rules governing points are so tricky that nobody completely understands the system.

Management arbitrarily penalizes workers for being sick and using earned sick leave, he complains. Someone who suddenly becomes ill, for example, and misses a day of work can get stung over and over with disciplinary points for just being sick.

Also, he says, work rules are archaic and unfair. For example, when someone wins at a slot machine, Dowell’s job as attendant is to go to the machine and write down the "pay line" — say, three cherries — and then report to a "cage," where another worker fills out a "pay slip" for the winner.

Then Dowell returns to the machine with a security guard to match up the pay line. If the pay line and pay slip amounts don’t agree, he can find himself hit with a "write-up" as punishment.

"We’re talking a noisy, crazy casino parlor any time of the day," he explains, "a place where mistakes do occur — just like they do in real life — and, thanks to the system in place, we workers should be able to catch mistakes before anything bad happens."

But instead of relying on that system to keep the books in order, he complains, "management’s attitude is to punish any little mistake so that a worker can find himself fired for, really, nothing at all."

BETTER DAYS. It was no surprise then in mid-January, when thanks to the perseverance of organizers like Lisowski and Dowell, workers at Prairie Meadows voted to unionize under AFSCME Council 61. Election of local officers is under way, and in April, contract negotiations began.

"This is a ground-up thing," says Jan Corderman, AFSCME International vice president and president of Council 61.

"We supported workers like Grace and Jerry after they first came to us with their complaints in 1996," she says, "and let me tell you, we union people have a lot to learn from workers just like them."

They’re the ones who stood out front of Prairie Meadows, she observes, "having their jobs threatened by this management and facing some real grief for their beliefs in economic fairness."

In the end, says Corderman, Council 61 is able now to "take their message to workers all across Iowa, letting them know that people can be proud when they stand up for better pay and issues that improve their lives."

The real winners at Prairie Meadows aren’t just the gamblers racking it in at the casino, says Corderman.

"It’s when union women and men stand together."