Fear grips the newsroom of Banker & Tradesman.
What if we ever let slip what it’s really like to stagger in each morning to be screamed at by editors, who demand, day after day, more and more news and opinion about commercial real estate – and all without benefit of psychiatric counseling or the occasional chance to write a nice story about flowers or something?
It’s brutal, but we do our jobs. It is a job. Hard to be too unhappy about a job these days.
But if the outside world finds out about the working conditions and 10-minute lunch breaks and mental duress, we face the danger of being rescued, of being liberated from this Hell on Earth called Banker & Tradesman.
Please don’t rescue us. We know what it’s like to be rescued from a tough job.
When the state cops engage in one of those Afghanistan-style raids on illegal cock fights, you know what happens to the animals? They get killed. They don’t make good pets – and nobody wants to hire them as bond traders or mortgage brokers. Off with their heads. That’s what it’s like to be “rescued” from a tough job.
And then there are the employees of cigar bars in Boston, who face impending unemployment by 2018, when cigar bars are banned – in large part to rescue the employees at the cigar bars, who, apparently, were tricked into believing that something else went on in cigar bars besides, you know, the smoking of cigars.
Several legislators crafted an amendment to rescue the cigar bars, or, to be more specific, to rescue the cigar bar employees who risk being out there on the streets with cranky roosters, looking for work. As Sen. Anthony Petruccelli, D-East Boston, explained it, guys who chose to work at cigar bars probably knew they were going to be around cigar smoke.
Gov. Patrick vetoed the tweak, of course, mumbling something about not wanting to step on the toes of local municipalities that wanted to shut down cigar bars and rescue the employees.
What Are They Smoking?
One could rage, rage against the storm of “Big Government” and the nanny state and the intrusion of regulatory nightmares on the business of running a business – but the cigar bar ban seems to cry out for something different; something approaching a call for common sense and clear thinking.
It’s not as if no one has noticed how odd it is to rescue cigar bar employees from cigar smoke. As Leonard Glantz, professor of health, law, bioethics and human rights at Boston University, put it in a letter to the Boston Globe: “If proponents of closing cigar bars wish to argue that those workers can find jobs elsewhere, then their argument that cigar bar workers are somehow ‘forced’ to breathe secondhand smoke vanishes. If other jobs are available, then the choice to work in a cigar bar is just that – a choice.”
The nation’s anti-smoking fervor ranges from nonexistent to tyrannical, with the degree of fervor depending in large part on the political and social culture of the jurisdiction. To the surprise of no one, the Libertarian cowboy states tend to have the least restrictive laws, with the Northeast the most constipated by far. What most jurisdictions have managed to do is carve out exemptions for cigar bars and tobacco stores.
Last year, Nebraska went through the typical exercise, banning indoor cigarette smoking, but prohibiting cities and towns from banning cigar bars. Nevada, unsurprisingly, is pro-cigar, allowing the Evil Demon Leaf to be smoked in strip clubs, brothels, casinos and, of course, tobacco shops.
The State of Washington finessed the issue a bit in 2006, when the attorney general ruled that cigar smoking was just fine in private clubs that don’t have paid employees. Thank God for those volunteers.
The Boston cigar bars, at least in theory, have until 2018 to build secret tunnels, so that the criminal cigar conspiracy can continue – or until Boston and the Boston Public Health Commission grow up.
I have to stop now. The crazy editors are screaming about deadlines. I wish I could get a job at a cigar bar.
