While Don­ald Trump’s push for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion for pres­i­dent is show­ing no signs of slow­ing, work­er unrest at a hotel and casi­no that bear his name appears near the boil­ing point. Strike prepa­ra­tions have begun for over 1,100 non-gam­ing casi­no employ­ees at the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jer­sey. The work­ers, rep­re­sent­ed by UNITE HERE Local 54, gath­ered near their local head­quar­ters last Tues­day to load strike mate­ri­als like bull­horns, signs and drums into a stor­age con­tain­er in a pub­lic attempt to prove to man­age­ment that they are ready and will­ing to strike over large com­pen­sa­tion pack­age cuts that occurred last year.

The Trump Taj Mahal has been at the mer­cy of bil­lion­aire investor Carl Icahn since 2009, when bank­rupt­cy led Don­ald Trump to cut ties with the casi­no and resort’s oper­a­tor, Trump Enter­tain­ment Resorts. After months of court­room dra­ma, Trump exchanged the rights to his name and like­ness over to Icahn (who Trump has men­tioned in recent months as a pos­si­ble cab­i­net mem­ber if he were elect­ed pres­i­dent) in exchange for a 10 per­cent stake in the restruc­tured company.

While Trump has run into his own prob­lems in Las Vegas, where work­ers at his cur­rent gam­ing jew­el, the Trump Casi­no, have start­ed a union dri­ve (though Trump is adamant that his work­ers love him), con­di­tions at his name­sake in Atlantic City have dete­ri­o­rat­ed into esca­lat­ed con­flict between new man­age­ment and the orga­nized hotel house­keep­ers, bar­tenders, servers, cooks, and san­i­ta­tion work­ers at the Trump Taj Mahal.

Since Icahn began his attempt to gain con­trol of Trump’s Atlantic City gam­ing empire, the union­ized work­ers at the Trump Taj Mahal have con­sis­tent­ly derid­ed Icahn’s alleged role in dri­ving the casi­no-hotel toward bank­rupt­cy, with work­ers and UNITE HERE argu­ing that Icahn, as Trump’s main debt hold­er , pushed high­er inter­est rates onto the com­pa­ny as a way to reach per­son­al prof­it of hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars and ulti­mate­ly maneu­ver into own­er­ship position.

In Octo­ber 2014, Icahn suc­cess­ful­ly gained per­mis­sion from a bank­rupt­cy judge to end com­pa­ny con­tri­bu­tions to health care and pen­sion ben­e­fits as a way of cost-cut­ting, say­ing it would help keep the casi­no-resort open. ​“Work­ers were stripped of their health and retire­ment ben­e­fits; they even cut paid lunch breaks. Our cal­cu­la­tion was that the aver­age full-time work­er would lose approx­i­mate­ly $12,000 over the course of the year as a result of these cuts,” says UNITE HERE spokesper­son Ben Begleiter.

UNITE HERE Local 54 con­tends that the bank­rupt­cy court was out of its juris­dic­tion with the deci­sion, and because Icahn has declined to renew the union’s con­tract since its expi­ra­tion in Sep­tem­ber, the mat­ter is a labor dis­pute fit for the NLRB, who has since agreed in a Jan­u­ary state­ment. The union’s case against the cuts is cur­rent­ly pend­ing in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.

A sur­vey of work­ers con­duct­ed by UNITE HERE in March found that 44 per­cent of respond­ing work­ers, who had pre­vi­ous­ly been cov­ered under a health care plan since their first day of employ­ment, no longer had health insur­ance. This was a much-val­ued health care pack­age that had led work­ers over the past decade to accept near-stag­nant wages in order to main­tain their health benefits.

“I’ve been part of the nego­ti­at­ing com­mit­tee for the past 11 years, and I vot­ed to have my pay frozen numer­ous times in order to pre­serve our health insur­ance. I got one 25-cents-an-hour raise in the past decade,” says Paul Smith, a sur­veyed cook, who has been at the site for 21 years. ​“In 2005, I had a mas­sive heart attack. The bill was over $1 mil­lion. If I hadn’t had the union health insur­ance, I would have been destroyed finan­cial­ly. Right now, my health is out of whack. I need three surg­eries, which is dif­fi­cult because I have no insur­ance since Icahn took it away.”

The sur­vey also claimed to shed light on the men­tal toll of out-of-reach health care, find­ing that at least 70 per­cent of par­tic­i­pat­ing work­ers suf­fered from symp­toms of depres­sion at least every oth­er day.

Dr. Alan Glaseroff, Co-Direc­tor of Stan­ford Coor­di­nat­ed Care and Clin­i­cal Pro­fes­sor of Med­i­cine at the Stan­ford School of Med­i­cine, reviewed the results and com­ment­ed: ​“Strict­ly from a finan­cial per­spec­tive, depres­sion as an ​‘add-on’ con­di­tion com­bined with dia­betes, heart dis­ease and oth­er chron­ic con­di­tions more than dou­bles the cost of treat­ing those ill­ness­es, mak­ing the lack of cov­er­age an even greater prob­lem for patients and those pay­ing for and pro­vid­ing their care.”

When the Octo­ber cuts were announced, 24 peo­ple were arrest­ed stag­ing a sit-in and shut­ting down traf­fic in front of the Trump Taj Mahal. In June, 68 more were arrest­ed for par­tic­i­pat­ing in a sim­i­lar action. Work­ers autho­rized the union’s con­tract nego­ti­at­ing com­mit­tee to a call a strike if nec­es­sary on July 16, a deci­sion that was fol­lowed up by reports that the Trump Taj Mahal was prepar­ing to take on sev­er­al hun­dred replace­ment workers.

Casi­no-hotel employ­ees in Atlantic City last went on strike in 2004 when 10,000 UNITE HERE Local 54 mem­bers walked out for over a month at sev­en dif­fer­ent loca­tions; Trump’s casi­no-hotels work­ers did not par­tic­i­pate in this strike. The Trump Taj Mahal and the Trop­i­cana Enter­tain­ment, Icahn’s oth­er bank­rupt­cy cap­ture in Atlantic City, are cur­rent­ly the only casi­no-hotels in the city work­ing with an expired con­tract. The pos­si­bil­i­ty remains open for Local 54 mem­bers at Trop­i­cana to go on strike as well.

Work­ers like Han­nah Taleb, a casi­no-hotel employ­ee in Pitts­burgh, allege that Icahn’s hard­ball tac­tics are an effort to low­er work­ers’ stan­dards through­out the indus­try. ​“If the stan­dards are low­ered in Atlantic City, how can I expect to fight for high stan­dards in my city? All casi­no work­ers are linked in that way,” Taleb told the Press of Atlantic City before being arrest­ed in June’s intersection-shut-down.

Icahn has a his­to­ry of elim­i­nat­ing work­er ben­e­fits at var­i­ous com­pa­nies he’s acquired over his years, build­ing a rep­u­ta­tion of as a cor­po­rate raider. ​“Mr. Icahn is worth more than $20 bil­lion, but two months before the con­tract for PSC’s union work­ers was sched­uled to expire in late 2013, man­age­ment told them that it was drop­ping their health insur­ance ben­e­fits and that they would have to buy their own insur­ance through the new exchanges set up under the Afford­able Care Act,” the New York Times report­ed last Decem­ber. Unsur­pris­ing­ly, Icahn was the one of the inspi­ra­tions for the Gor­don Gecko char­ac­ter made famous by Michael Dou­glas in Oliv­er Stone’s Wall Street.

“Jobs that pro­vid­ed ben­e­fits, that were mid­dle-class jobs where a work­er could sup­port a fam­i­ly on [are] part of the promise of casi­no gam­ing,” Begleit­er says. ​“Casi­no gam­ing in Atlantic City is unlike any oth­er indus­try in the state, because it’s an indus­try that came into exis­tence by a vote of the peo­ple of New Jer­sey to change the con­sti­tu­tion — specif­i­cal­ly to rebuild Atlantic City. That means in part, mak­ing sure that it pro­vid­ed for work­ers,” Begleit­er says.