Smoking ban, workers’ rights

I don’t smoke. I don’t particularly like being in establishments where a lot of people are sucking on the coffin nails, either. The air is dry, it smells bad and I’m persuaded by the still-developing science on the health dangers of second-hand smoke.

Cinthya Perez convinced her restaurant employer, El Comal Taqueria, to adopt a no-smoking policy.

So I can just leave, right? When a City-County Council committee voted down a proposed smoking ban last month, the head of the Restaurant & Hospitality Association of Indiana said it was a free market decision. After all, restaurant owners are just giving customers what they want.

He has a point. I can always choose to go to another restaurant or bar that is smoke-free, or just stay at home and leave smokers in their nicotine-fueled peace.

But free market explanations always seem to break down when we talk about the most powerless people in our society. So let’s consider the guy bussing the tables and cleaning the ashtrays, and the woman behind the counter who goes home smelling like a Winston. What if they don’t like sucking down smoky discharge either? What if they don’t like the asthma complications and the increased risk for cancer and heart disease? But what if they need the job to make the rent or get school clothes for their kids?

“If I go into a restaurant and someone is smoking, I have a right to say I don’t like it and leave,” says Maria Luisa Tishner of the Indiana Latino Institute. “But the people who work there have no choice.”

The interest in workplace smoking issues is a natural for Tishner and the Latino Institute. Even though Latinos have lower smoking rates than the national average, they are far more likely to be employed in the service industry or labor sector, where smoky workplaces are common. According to the National Restaurant Association, Latinos make up 18 percent of the restaurant workforce.

Cinthya Perez, a cashier at El Comal Taqueria on West Washington Street, is Latino, as are her nine fellow employees on the restaurant staff. Perez, a 19-year-old Arsenal Tech graduate who came here from Mexico six years ago, convinced her employer to declare the restaurant smoke-free. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable working in a place being around smoke, and I know that other employees feel the same way,” Perez says.

Perez and Tishner are both members of L.A.T.I.N.O.S. (Latinos Against Tobacco In Our Neighborhood Overcoming Smoke). Other members of the group have approached the owners of their favorite local restaurants and asked them to go smoke-free. The group even has small Spanish-language stickers that can be placed on restaurant bills (“Vendria mas seguido si no hubiera gente que fuma!”) saying that the patron will return more often if smoking is prohibited. Five restaurants have responded to the L.A.T.I.N.O. campaign by switching to smoke-free, with three more restaurants set to announce their change very soon.

But few workers are as able as Perez to walk away from an unsafe job, and their market power to influence restaurant owners has significant limits. So the L.A.T.I.N.O.S. victories have only somewhat lessened the activists’ disappointment that a proposed ban on smoking in many local public places was rejected last month by the City-County Council’s Rules and Public Policy committee (“Proposed Smoking Ban Rejected By Council,” Nov. 19).

I can’t say I’ve agreed with many things City-County Councilor Beulah Coughenour has said over the years. But she was right on with her criticism of her fellow members as “cowardly” for hiding behind procedural pretext for voting against the ban.

If the dissenting council members had valid reasons for opposing the ban, they should have voiced them. Instead, several councilors claimed they shouldn’t vote on a ban until their constituents do the hard work and then come to the council with a compromise. That, councilors, is ducking your duty. Not to mention a little disingenuous.

If they were to be truthful, the dissenting members of the council would acknowledge that they were influenced by the smoking ban being opposed by the restaurant-bar industry and their lobbyists, who routinely host fund-raisers and other events for the local political parties and their candidates.

But honesty is not likely to prevail here. Because if the councilors were honest, they would have a job to do that is about as distasteful as licking an ashtray. They would have to look Cinthya Perez and her fellow restaurant workers in the eye and admit that their customers’ need to light up, and their bosses’ need for high profits, mean more to the council than the workers’ health.

To reach the Indiana Latino Institute, call 472-1055 or check www.indianalatino.com.