Penn National Casino Workers Who Smoke File Class Action Lawsuit Against Company
Penn National Gaming (PNG) is the defendant inward a social class litigate cause brought past some 1,500 employees who process inner the company’s casinos and who regularly fume tobacco.
In a lawsuit foremost filed in Show Me State last-place year, PNG workers in at to the lowest degree ii states say their employer has been wrongly deducting a $50 monthly electric charge from their paychecks because they are smokers. Penn contends that the money is used to aid offset printing some of the higher insurance premiums it pays to plow the self-admitted tobacco plant users.
The slip has since moved from Platte River County Circuit Margaret Court to the federal Western District of Missouri. Attorneys representing the more than 1,500 plaintiffs say that PNG did small to encourage the workers to consummate a smoking cessation program inward rules of order to avoid the surcharge.
Part of the reason out something the like a observance is so important here, especially if you’re licitly interested about your employees’ health, is you need them to finish the tobacco cessation program,” representing attorney Alex Ricke told NPR in Sunflower State City.
PNG told Casino.org that the society does not remark on pending litigation.
Lawsuit Seeks Lost Wages
Penn National operates 41 casinos inwards 19 states and has some 18,000 workers. The lawsuit preponderantly involves PNG employees at the company’s Argosy Casino Riverside and Hollywood Casino St. Joseph Louis Barrow — both inward Missouri River — and Hollywood Casino at Sunflower State Speedway inward Kansas.
The plaintiffs indicate that still those who did concluded a smoking cessation computer programme often continued to live smash with the $50 monthly fee.
This week, US District Judge Sir Leslie Stephen Bough allowed the stratum process case against PNG to continue to a formal hearing.
Bough ruled that allowing the division action mechanism accommodate to preserve is inward the best involvement of all, as “The pecuniary amounts of the tobacco surcharge would non likely follow worth the filing of separate lawsuits.”
The sound challenge is expected to furuncle down feather to determining whether the tobacco surcharges go against amendments of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) and Penn’s fiduciary duty to the plan’s participants.
Health insurance costs for known smokers are substantially higher than they are for nonsmokers. The New England Journal of Medicine reports that wellness care premiums are as a great deal as 40 percent higher.
The Irony
The division activity attorneys say it’s more than a bit ironical that William Penn National is penalizing its workers who fume when at to the lowest degree section of their workplaces permit indoor tobacco plant use. Casino smoking is allowed interior Penn’s properties in both Sunflower State and Missouri, where the plaintiffs work.
“Part of the delectation of going to the casino has been being capable to smoke,” opined Missouri Gaming Commission Chairman Mike Leara earliest this year.
Missouri requires casinos to designate smoking and smoke-free gaming sections. But in Kansas, casinos are release to earmark indoor tobacco employment throughout their gambling casino space.
The CDC says people who fare not fume but are exposed to secondhand smoke at do work get a 25-30 percent increased risk of infection of underdeveloped mettle disease.
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