Danger, you've exceeded your daily red herring limit!!
What percentage of the available jobs do you seriously think that "smoking establishment employees" would represent? Somehow I imagine the ratio of those jobs to the number of unemployeed as something on the order of 1:10000.
To hear you describe it, people are-were being forced into smoking establishment jobs with the four horsemen of the apocalypse at their backs. I've been broke and I've been unemployed but I never had "waitron" as my only choice or even a viable one.
Furthermore, you've overlooked my statement "where everyone agrees ahead of time that.." -- this means that employees agree that well, working here is dangerous. Maybe employers are "required" to provide health insurance during and for some reasonable period after employment or some other arrangement that demonstrates they are buttuming some of the employees' risk.
Maybe the service staff is segregated from the actual smoking areas. There's dozens of ways to solve this so that people who don't smoke aren't exposed to it and people who want to smoke can smoke.
But that in itself IS the problem with creating "safe" smoking areas -- ban proponents don't want smoking at all, and any compromise, even silly ones like one-person sealed smoking booths with NASA-grade air circulation and purification won't be good enough since NO SMOKING EVER BY ANYONE is their real goal.
It's the legal underpinning of the ban; the noble notion that we're aiding a group of people forced to work as waitrons at gunpoint is preposterous. Especially when about every waitron I've ever known has smoked.
Be interesting to compare the actual rest rates of waitrons vs. other professions -- if they came even close, why it might have some merit. I suspect it doesn't, and that the "risk" we're mitigating is a red herring used to enable the anti-smoking crusade's ban.