Welfare of stable-area workers should not be linked to other initiatives such as phone betting

Consider this hypothetical situation. You are crossing a street while walking a beloved dog, and approaching you is a total stranger. You notice a truck bearing down on the intersection at high speed. You can save yourself and the dog, or you can be certain of saving yourself and the stranger. What is your course of action?

The answer, according to Western ethics and religion, is clear-cut-albeit painful. You would save yourself and the stranger because the preservation of human life is an overriding priority.

Unfortunately, life is rarely so uncomplicated as a runaway truck. Life is full of difficult choices, and sometimes the sanctity of human life is not the first consideration. In this regard, the Thoroughbred racing industry just does not get it.

We as an industry love our horses, as we should, and we will do just about anything to protect their lives. We have several veterinary research funds and rescue agencies that do excellent work and deserve the industry's support.

But how well does the industry take care of the people who labor in the trenches of the Thoroughbred industry, doing the dirty work that leads to the splendor of the winner's circle? Not very well, and the industry's power brokers, including the Jockey Club and National Thoroughbred Racing Association (NTRA), repeatedly have declined to shoulder any comprehensive responsibility for the people in America's stable areas.

In April, the Los Angeles Times published a carefully researched and written article on conditions at Southern California's racetracks. The story found that many stable workers were living in substandard housing, otherwise known as tack rooms. Subsequent inspections by state and federal investigators confirmed that finding and also discovered that some stable workers were being paid in cash and that some were not receiving the minimum wage.

Robert Tourtelot, chairman of the California Horse Racing Board, initially accused the Times reporter of distortion and then suggested not taking a "proactive" approach to backstretch conditions, which means doing nothing at all. Fortunately, wiser voices on the board and among its staff members counseled full cooperation with any investigation.

Anyone who is shocked that backstretch conditions are deplorable suffers from either a poor or a very selective memory. A decade ago, Bill Nack chronicled the squalor of stable workers' lives in Sports Illustrated.

In fact, California may have better conditions than other areas because of the rebuilding at Hollywood Park in the mid-1980s, new dormitories at Bay Meadows Race Course, and the Winners Foundation, an organization that helps track workers impaired by alcohol or drugs. Frank Stronach has promised better housing at Santa Anita Park and Golden Gate Fields.

Largely in response to conditions discovered on California's backstretches, a package of legislation is working its way through the California legislature in Sacramento to improve the lives of stable workers. The legislation includes three bills, and in many ways resembles the old shell game played at traveling carnivals in decades past.

The carney would put a pea under one of three walnut shells, shift them around quickly, and then have the sucker, er, patron, try to pick the shell containing the pea. (Actually, the pea was usually in the palm of the carnival worker.)

One bill would require racetrack housing to meet state standards and would mandate that employers, most of whom are trainers, pay minimum wage and overtime. Another bill would require trainers to bargain collectively with a union representing stable workers. The other two bills would legalize Internet and phone betting for horse racing and bar those activities for all other gambling forms.

So, under which shell is the pea? The wages-and-housing provision is getting most of the attention, and if passed would incrementally improve the lives of stable workers. The union provision is all but laughable to anyone who knows the backstretch; even the toughest union organizers would be 99-to-1 to succeed in an environment with its own culture and a work force that now is largely foreign-born.

By process of elimination, the pea-that is, the money-is under the phone-betting shell. True, the NTRA and TVG badly need phone-account wagering in California, but this gambling issue should be considered on its own merits. To link it in any way to racetrack living conditions is unfair to and disrespectful of the stable workers of California.