In a lengthy open letter to local 54 employees of the Trump Taj Mahal published Thursday, Carl Icahn wrote:
“I want to make clear that I am not against healthcare plans for employees and I am not against unions. In fact, many of the companies I own have unionized employees with fair and balanced healthcare plans. However, the leadership of those unions does not try to squeeze profits from the employees and their employers. That is what I find so abhorrent about your union leadership – they are attempting to hold a bankrupt business hostage by threatening labor unrest if they do not receive exorbitant payments into their own highly profitable healthcare scheme.”
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Icahn has been fighting the union over cost-saving measures at the bankrupt Taj Mahal. The court killed the casino’s health insurance, and Icahn would like to switch the employees to Obamacare, which he’s willing to subsidize.
ICahn noted:
“Over the last five years, while the Taj Mahal has gone bankrupt not just once, but twice, your UNITEHERE Health plan has made $140 million in net income! Yet even against the backdrop of your employer entering bankruptcy for the second time in five years, your union leadership continues to demand that the Taj make exorbitant contributions to the profitable UNITEHERE Health plan, or else suffer labor unrest.”
Here comes the interesting part, as Icahn continues: “But ask yourself – where has that $140 million in net income even gone? Certainly it did nothing to help the Taj Mahal, which continues to lose millions of dollars every month.
“It all reminds me of that bygone era when organized crime would demand grocers pay for protection or suffer bricks being thrown through their store windows. The only real difference here is that instead of throwing bricks through the Taj Mahal’s windows, your union instead organizes strikes, picketing, boycotts and other attacks to deter customers from patronizing the Taj Mahal.
“Either way, the message is the same – pay an exorbitant “protection” fee or suffer the consequences.”
Icahn blames the unions for the fact that “a third of Atlantic City’s casinos went under last year alone, ” to the point where “it will be hailed a success if the $2.4 billion Revel finally sells for less than 5% of its cost.”
Icahn tell the casino employees that their union President Bob McDevitt actually said that if the Taj Mahal does not make contributions to the UNITEHERE Health plan he believes Taj workers will just say “then close the place.”
“But I have received numerous letters and phone calls from employees of the Taj Mahal thanking me for committing to lend the Taj Mahal the necessary funds to stay open and urging me to do whatever is necessary to save their jobs, ” Icahn continued. “As a result, I sincerely believe that what Taj Mahal employees want is to work for a financially stable enterprise with ownership that is willing to invest in the property.”
“The bottom line is that, even without making exorbitant contributions to the UNITEHERE Health plan, the Taj Mahal is currently losing millions of dollars every month, and it desperately needs millions of additional dollars to fund long-delayed capital improvements, ” Icahn concluded. “If the Taj Mahal had to make exorbitant contributions to fund UNITEHERE Health’s $140 million of net income on top of those mounting losses and enormous capital expenditure requirements, there is simply no way it could emerge from bankruptcy as a viable operation.”
