Clearing the Air

Barkeeps in Barstow aren’t the only ones keenly interested in California’s 100-day-old ban on smoking in pubs and gaming clubs.

In yet another indication of California’s global reach, state and local officials involved in passing or monitoring the ban, the toughest such measure in the U.S., say they’ve received inquiries from communities as far-flung as Perth, Australia, and Nottingham, England.

Foreign politicians, health officials and journalists are tracking the progress of the measure, many with the hope of making workplaces smoke-free in their homeland, officials said.

“What people are saying is that if California can do bars, we should at least be able to do workplaces,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor at the UC San Francisco Medical School and a staunch anti-smoking activist.

So far, it appears the law is working. In Los Angeles County, noncompliance complaints have been filed against fewer than 5% of the 8,200 county establishments the law covers.

“California is a major battleground,” said State Sen. Diane Watson, who chairs a Senate committee that recently killed one effort to overturn the ban. “Other countries are watching, and they see our success.”

It’s that global interest, Glantz charges, that has the tobacco industry working hard to repeal the ban.

Gary Auxier, a spokesman for the National Smoker’s Alliance, backed by the tobacco industry, said that’s not so. His group keeps pushing for repeal because “this is a bad law that hurts business owners who want to accommodate their customers without government intrusion.”

Whatever the motivation, experts in labor and politics say the continuing debate over the law that outlawed workplace smoking goes beyond the typical health versus income dichotomy that often develops when the government moves in to clean up a perceived workplace hazard.

With more finesse than your typical barroom brawl, some tavern owners and smokers’ rights advocates have turned the ban into a debate about civil liberties and personal freedoms.

Watson described the workplace safety debate as one of the most contentious she’s ever seen.

Tom Adamo, owner of the Saloon, a biker bar in Palm Springs, admits that he’s not complying with the law. Adamo, a nonsmoker, talks about government intrusion and claims that when he tried to enforce the law, business dropped by at least 50%.

He doesn’t have a lot of sympathy for bar employees who object to workplace haze: “If they want to breathe clean air, they should find another field of work.”

Adamo said if workers “chose that environment to work in, then they have to take all of the ramifications that go with it.”

Eugene Ruenger, a professor of Industrial Hygiene at the University of Wisconsin, noted that any business could use that argument to avoid cleaning up a workplace contaminant.

“Yes, it’s my right to quit, but that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be controls and limits,” on exposure to potential hazards, said Ruenger, who for 10 years has studied the effects of improved ventilation on secondhand smoke.

Della Lisi, who tends bar at an Orange County hotel and has been in the business about 10 years, responds to such like-it-or-leave-it arguments on a more personal level.

“It’s lucrative,” she said of her job, adding that her tips have not fallen since the ban went into effect. “I enjoy it. I’m supposed to just quit my job, making great money working at a bar because [some bar owners] care not one iota for the health of their employees.”

Bartender Sabrina Wolby, also a 10-year veteran, used to hold her breath during shifts at the trendy Axis nightclub in West Hollywood.

“It’s very hard to get good air when there are 10 cigarettes in your face and 200 in the room,” said Wolby, who invested in a portable air filtration device to help clear the air at work.

“Now you can just breathe freely.”

Nancy Outlaw, who for 25 years has tended bar at the Oyster House Saloon in Studio City, sees it differently.

“It was my choice to work in a smoking or nonsmoking place,” said Outlaw, a smoker for 40 years. Despite undergoing surgery for throat cancer last year, she still opposes the ban. “If I don’t care to work [there], then I have the right to leave.”

Jonathan Fielding, the county’s health officer, noted that even for employees who smoke, exposure to secondhand smoke increases the risk of some heart and lung ailments.

“Many risks are related to dosage,” or smoke intake, said Fielding. “And working in an establishment that has a lot of side-stream smoke definitely increases their risk.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared that secondhand smoke is a human carcinogen.

John Miller, an aide to Sen. Watson, cited a 1992 study on smoking and restaurants that showed that in California, waitresses have the highest mortality rate of any female occupational group.

But Auxier, of the Smoker’s Alliance, disagreed that California workers need the kind of protection the ban offers.

“Protect them from what? From losing their jobs? You’re assuming there was a [health] risk to those employees, and I would suggest” there is not, said Auxier.

Auxier’s group and the Orange County-based AIR (Americans for Individual Rights) are continuing their efforts to repeal the ban, relying in part on a very visible media campaign and letters to California’s legislators.

To bolster their case, they’re using lost-business testimonials from bar owners like Adamo and Damian Hanlon, co-owner of Molly Malone’s, the Fairfax Avenue bar that’s been a command post of sorts for the anti-ban brigade. Hanlon said he’s already had to let five workers go because the bar entertains fewer customers, who often spend less time and money.

Business revenue figures from the state Board of Equalization, which would indicate how the ban has affected bars so far, will not be available until June.

However, a controversial study co-written by Glantz and released last year examining the first seven California locations that outlawed smoking in bars, found that eateries and pubs did not suffer any significant loss of business.

“Our business has never been better,” said Bob Davis, a waiter at a top San Francisco restaurant-bar combination who has worked in the restaurant-bar business for 13 years.

And a Los Angeles County survey released in February showed that 85% of bar patrons said they will go to bars more often or not change their bar-going behavior as a result of the new law.

California’s 850,000 bar workers comprise the last group of workers to enjoy the protections extended to nearly all other workers in the state three years ago.

As the bar ban moves past the 100-day-mark, the possibility that anti-ban activists may eventually succeed has some workers on edge.

“We’re panicked that this might come back,” said Wolby. “Now that it’s gone [cigarette smoke], now we know we couldn’t go backward.”

If the ban is repealed, she said, she’d have to quit.