"Smoking causes death...to your career"
 

Quit smoking or quit your job, company says
Overweight workers could be next
Thursday, January 27, 2005 Posted: 5:28 AM EST (1028 GMT)

CHICAGO, Illinois (Reuters) -- The owner of a Michigan company who forced his employees to either quit smoking or quit their jobs said on Wednesday he also wants to tell fat workers to lose weight or else.

A ban on tobacco use -- whether at home or at the workplace -- led four employees to quit their jobs last week at Okemos, Michigan-based Weyco Inc., which handles insurance claims.

The workers refused to take a mandatory urine test demanded of Weyco's 200 employees by founder and sole owner Howard Weyers, a demand that he said was perfectly legal.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/US/01/26/smoking.reut/index.html

interesting to hear employers taking an initiative to worker's health. About time someone stepped up and cut the fat in the american workplace. Sounds harsh to some people, but neither smokers or fat people are protected classes.

I have no problem with it. Employees that smoke spend a lot of time smoking when they should be working. I think it's also detrimental to a company's image to have smokers clustered around the entrances and exits of the building.

Overweight, out-of-shape employees will tend to have more sick days, also give off a negative image, and will cost the company more in health care.

The owner is within his rights I believe.

What if this employer said employees were not allowed to drink (off the job of course) regardless of how much? How about spending $50/week on lottery tickets? When you start disallowing things that are legal, it's a really slippery slope.

Plus, what definition of "overweight" is he using? He sounds like a total Nazi from the news story - I'd really love to see if he applies the same standards to men and women.

From an article on SHRM:

Legal experts say that few court decisions have addressed such company policies. However, they say that in states such as Michigan, where there is no smokers' rights legislation on the books, Weyco's policy and practices might be legal.

"There's legal discrimination and there's illegal discrimination," said Peter J. Petesch, an employment attorney who is a partner at Ford & Harrison LLP in Washington, D.C. Unless the company's actions can be shown to violate a specific state or federal law—such as discriminating against a protected class, on the basis of race or religion or the like—it might be difficult for employees and
applicants to challenge them successfully in court.

"Although we might feel a sense of moral outrage when a class of people is discriminated against," said Petesch, "it may very well be legal. There have been common-law theories advanced" in the effort to have groups such as smokers protected by job bias laws, but "they have not necessarily been successful."

Weyco's Climes, a former smoker himself who knows "how hard it is to quit," said that "our legal counsel reviewed this very closely."

However, Edwin G. Foulke, an employment attorney with the Greenville, S.C, office of law firm Jackson Lewis LLP and a former chair of the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission, said Weyco's actions could raise issues under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

"I wouldn't be surprised to see somebody litigate this issue," he stated. Jury members weighing such a policy "might ask themselves, 'Is this really fair?' " he said.

Twenty-nine states have smokers' rights laws. At the same time, many states have laws banning smoking in most workplaces, setting up the potential for confusion and conflict about what workers can do—and where. Some laws and company policies extend smoking bans to outdoor property such as parking lots, and some even try to keep people who have been smoking in the previous two hours from entering a building and bringing some of the haze in with them.

According to the National Law Journal, the Union Pacific railroad company announced last year that it was implementing a no-smoking policy for all employees, both on and off company property. The firm said it questions potential hires about smoking. And Alaska Airlines reportedly has a similar policy, requiring job applicants to pass a nicotine test.

The National Law Journal noted that in a 1987 court case the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the right of the Oklahoma City Fire Department to have a no-smoking policy, finding that the rule had a legitimate purpose in promoting health and safety.

But at a private-sector employer whose workers tend to work in offices, a policy barring all smokers appears to be "extremely drastic," said Peter P. Fornal, president of Human Resource Consultants in East Greenwich, R.I., and a member of the Society for Human Resource Management's Employee Relations Panel.

Yeah, I agree the company has the right to make such policies as far as employment criteria/

However, some might view this as discrimination or intrusion of their privacy. What they do at home is their own business-- as long as they don't bring it to work.

What if they ban other substances...like alcohol [like 33girl suggested]?

If that were to happen, the employees always have the choice to work there or not. Personally, I'd enjoy an atmosphere like that.

I seem to remember reading earlier that he was willing to give vouchers to his employees to pay them for the cost of joining a gym.

Banning alcohol is different, banning ALCOHOLISM would be the literal analog here. The issue is with the endemic detrimental effects of smoking to the workplace, in the form of lost days, image, and the hypocrisy of charging more for insurance for something 50% of employees do themselves.

Now, alcohol in moderation has no such ill effects - if anything, it's positive. If the employer feels that alcohol may be a problem, and this has been supported by medical experts, most likely testing as proposed with smoking in this case would be perfectly legal.

Now, just because it's legal, that obviously doesn't make it any less invasive. However, employers are under no obligations to treat their employees in a certain fashion, except as dictated by law. It's just like pay scale - if you don't like it or can't live on it, you don't take the job. Honestly, if you can't or don't want to quit smoking . . . don't, and go find another job. Many jobs have lifestyle considerations attached, and while I agree with the conceptual understanding of the legal 'slippery slope' I just don't think it applies here yet.

Now, it's not a far jaunt to get there - it'll be interesting to see how this develops.

What if he said you weren't allowed to motorcycle ride or sky dive because it was risky? Would you enjoy that?

How about if you weren't permitted to do anything involved with your fraternity, because fraternities are huge insurance risks don't cha know, and they might get sued and if people know you're a member it would make the company look bad. Or if you were told you weren't allowed to join either the John Birch Society or Greenpeace (take your pick).

The gym vouchers were for $45 - I don't know what it's like in MI, but that's pretty much what it costs to walk in the door at most decent gyms around here.

They're a third party administrator, not a carrier. They do not set the insurance rates, they try to get the best options for their clients from the available carriers.

What TPAs and carriers do in their free time has nothing to do with the rates companies are charged. It's not an issue of hypocrisy. Joe's Coal Company full of 60 year olds is going to pay lots more for insurance than Joe's Office Supply Store full of 25 year olds simply because of the obvious differences in what they do on the job. There's only so much the TPA or broker can do to remedy that.

They can encourage their clients to develop wellness programs, but I think that telling their clients to use this same policy would be professional suicide.

I can see how this is a "slippery slope", but I have to say that I somewhat agree with him. He did go a little far saying employees cannot even smoke in their personal life off the company clock, but...

I think non-smokers will agree with me that smokers take far many more breaks than the non-smokers, as well as when they return to their work environments everyone around them can smell them - trust me on this one. Also, I know at my company it is a constant battle to get the smokers to 1. smoke in the specified area and 2. place their butts in the provided containers instead of just stomping them on the ground and leaving them. Our VP of HR has come within days of having to make our office a non-smoking one because the owner WAS NOT happy about the disrespect to his building and grounds.

As for the gym, if my company would give me a $45 voucher it would cover the cost of a monthly membership and then some. I would be very happy, and put it to good use.

Too bad they couldn't get away with firing women who plan to get pregnant.

Yeah, cause, you know, to add to the blanket, every fat person is a lazy, slow, unmotivated slob that should be hidden from society right? God forbid it's a medical thing.... :rolleyes:

Yeah yeah, I know what you're gonna say before you even say it....I'm just saying not all obese people fit this stereotype....

Many contracts include clauses of this type - even professional athletes have contracts voided for doing things like that. Again, it's a massively dick thing to do to employees, but it's probably legal - and it will alienate some, but it doesn't infringe on their right to work, really.

This really rings as specious to me - these aren't parallels to smoking, neither in scope nor scale. However, again - not protected groups, just dick moves to make.

I'll get anecdotal here, and say that in my current position I would not be allowed to work here if I joined Greenpeace, and it would be perfectly legal and justifiable (NDA and anonymity concerns) - and I'm sorry, I'll never do that again, I hate anecdotal evidence.

Eh, even if it's just paying the initiation fees, it's a start. I do think, however, that punishing for obesity may be (legally) over the line.

Saying that, on a grander scale than you and I here, 33, it troubles me that Americans demand insurance (and cheap, at that) from their employers, but there is outcry over employers taking steps to ensure their employees' health in a much more active (and some would say over-active) manner. We've truly gotten to the point of sloth, where we're burning it on both ends . . .

Again, this is a group protected by existing workplace laws and regulations, and not a valid comparison to smokers.