Inside Asian Gaming

INSIDE ASIAN GAMING | March 2014 12 “Our front-line workers told us that casino operators are assembling the most popular games and the manually operated games together into the smoking zones and leave the automatic ones such as slot machines in the non-smoking areas,”said Choi Kam Fu, deputy director-general of the Macau Gaming Enterprises Staff Association. “As a result,” he told the English-language Macau Daily Times , “most workers are still working in areas constantly filled with second- hand cigarette smoke. Air quality has not improved significantly, it might have deteriorated, and that’s the worst scenario, the one we were most worried about.” The association estimated at the time that twice as many dealers were working in the new smoking areas as in non-smoking and suggested the government remedy this with some form of ratio of smoking to non-smoking tables. Nothing was done. Around the same time, another workers’ rights group, Forefront of Macao Gaming, called for a variation of the ratio idea. They suggested eliminating slot machines and unmanned automated table games from areas counted as non-smoking. This was not taken up either. “The government doesn’t know the difference between 50% of floor area and 50% of gaming tables, and that’s why we’re inhaling more cigarette smoke,” Forefront said. “If they don’t use the number of tables instead of floor areas for measuring non- smoking areas, the new rule should be scrapped, otherwise we only suffer more.” So what Forefront did was deliver a petition to the office of SJM Holdings Executive Director Angela Leong, who was running Something like more than half of Chinese men smoke, compared with less than 3% of women, and the rate rises dramatically above the age of 20. About 42% of smokers are men from the ages of 35 to 54. It’s the Asian casino industry’s principal demographic. In Focus