BACKSTRETCH WORKERS
Does racing do enough to help its backstretch workers? America’s backstretch workers have struggled quietly for decades. Working without contracts with the trainers who employ them, in a country lacking national racing regulations and standards, they are at the mercy of the racetracks, horsemen’s associations, and the generic federal and state legislation applying to all workers. Minimum wage is a great concept only when it’s enforced.
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WORDS: BILL HELLER PHOTOS: HORSEPHOTOS.COM, JOannE K. aDaMS, ExECuTIvE DIRECTOR Of BELMOnT CHILD CaRE aSSOCIaTIOn
ARING people have rushed in to fill the vacuum on the backstretch, and there are heroes everywhere: racing chaplains around the country; a legendary trainer in California; philanthropic, dedicated owners in New York; a visionary Boy Scout in Chicago; and hundreds, if not thousands, of other sympathetic horsemen and volunteers. They do whatever needs to be done to give these workers and their families a decent life. It’s a complicated mission. “Overall, is it better than 25 years ago? Yes,” said Philip Hanrahan, Executive Director of the National Horsemen’s Benevolent & Protective Association (HBPA). “Is it light years better? No. It’s a hard life. I have the utmost respect for the men and women there every day taking care of horses.” Respect doesn’t buy a loaf of bread. In 2008, an investigation at Saratoga Race Course by the New York State Department of
Labor found that more than 1,275 workers had been underpaid by trainers. The department collected $600,000 in underpayments from 110 trainers and $60,000 in penalties. Two years later, the day after the 2010 season concluded on Labor Day, the New York Daily News ran a story with the headline: “The Hidden shame of Saratoga: Back-stretch (sic) workers live in terrible conditions.” The story said workers “make little more than minimum wage and often get cheated out of overtime, as Labor Department enforcers have repeatedly found,” and that “workers literally sleep a few yards from the animals they spend their days with – not to mention the manure piles. Worst of all, the cramped quarters can and do become ovens – with nighttime temperatures inside their rooms hovering well over 100 degrees during a heat wave earlier this summer.” Workers being mistreated at meets as prestigious as Saratoga doesn’t bode well for their contemporaries at smaller venues. Yet Saratoga offers the most comprehensive
backstretch cultural program in the nation, and Saratoga’s sister New York Racing Association (NYRA) track, Belmont Park on Long Island, has an outstanding day care center for children of workers, Anna House, which also serves Aqueduct. All three NYRA tracks have a comprehensive support system – the Backstretch Employee Service Team – as well as a caring, giving partner, the New York Thoroughbred Horsemen’s Association (NYTHA). At Saratoga, NYRA has rehabilitated two new dormitories for backstretch workers, and four more were expected to be ready by opening day of the 40-day meet on July 18. NYRA has preliminary plans to do the same at Belmont Park, but little progress has been made. This is a complex issue. But it doesn’t have to be. In the United Kingdom, an agreement between the National Trainers Federation and the National Association of Stable Staff spells out racing industry minimum wages on a scale
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