The casino was built by Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, then-Trump Entertainment Resorts chairman, in 1990.
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Atlantic City’s main casino workers union has been on strike against the Taj Mahal since July 1.
The announcement came Wednesday, a day before the walkout will become the longest in the 38-year history of Atlantic City’s casino era.
Like much of Atlantic City, Trump’s properties suffered mightily since the financial crisis. Four of its 12 casinos remain shut after closing in 2014, though one reopened as a hotel only. Once the second-largest gambling market in the USA after Las Vegas, Atlantic City has been battered by competition from new casinos in Pennsylvania, New York and Maryland. “Our directors can not just allow the Taj to continue burning through tens of millions of dollars when the Union has single handedly blocked any plan to profitability”. But the union was unable to reach a new deal for the Trump Taj Mahal.
His company also owned the now-shuttered Trump Plaza Casino and Hotel and was forced to sell Trump Marina Hotel Casino five years ago. Having lost ownership of the company to bondholders in a previous bankruptcy, Trump resigned as chairman of Trump Entertainment Resorts, retaining a 10 percent stake in return for the use of his name.
The president of a union whose strike against the Trump Taj Mahal led owner Carl Icahn to decide to shut the gambling hall down is denouncing the billionaire investor. The workers wanted their health insurance and pension benefits back.
Icahn has offered to partially restore these benefits but not to the level that Local 54 is demanding, claiming that the offer isn’t even on par with the benefits enjoyed by workers at Icahn’s other AC property, the Tropicana. Unions turned down the offer.
In a statement by the president of Local 54, Bob McDevitt, the union put the blame on mismanagement by Icahn – and threw in a sideshot at Trump, who has floated Icahn as a potential treasury secretary if he wins the presidential election in November.
The report added that the Trump Taj Mahal workers are among the lowest-paid in Atlantic City, getting an average wage of less than Dollars 12 an hour.
“Mr. Icahn’s actions today are nothing more than an act of corporate Wall Street greed”, Mazzeo wrote in a statement Wednesday.
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McDevitt said the Taj Mahal shutdown was the third recent Atlantic City casino closing in which Icahn had a hand. He had said he was going to inject $100 million into the casino to keep it running in exchange for concessions from the union and $175 million in tax breaks from New Jersey and Atlantic City. The owners plan to send out layoff notices to their 3,000 employees in the next two days.
