The mayor of Las Vegas, Carolyn Goodman, has called for the city’s casinos to reopen as early as the middle of May. In her opinion, Nevada’s coronavirus lockdown is “total insanity”.
However, Goodman has been strongly condemned for her views, not least by the casino workers who demand that she create a safety plan before opening the gambling facilities. Her views have been called reckless and dangerous.
Casino workers took to the media to express just how uncomfortable they are about the prospect of returning to work until safety measures were worked out, including protective equipment, through cleaning of the properties and strict social distancing measures.
“Nobody wants people to go back more than I do, but everyone wants to go back to a safe and secure workplace and not be an experiment in a petri dish,” said D. Taylor, the president of the UNITE Here workers union which represents 300,000 hospitality workers across the United States.
Goodman has been criticized for saying that putting safety plans into place in Las Vegas casinos was not her responsibility.
She told CNN’s Anderson Cooper in an interview this week, that it was up to the casinos to figure out how to prioritize the safety of employees.
“I’d love everything open because I think we’ve had viruses for years that have been here,” she said in the interview. “I’m not a private owner of a hotel. I wish I were. And I would have the cleanest hotel with 6 feet figured out for every human being that comes in there.”
