Smoking on Job : No More Ifs, Ands, Butts--It’s Law

“I think smoking is a serious disease, a terrible addiction that drains human energy, causes fires, dirties floors, soils clothing, detracts from the enjoyment of a good meal and kills people . “ --Marvin Braude, author of Los Angeles’ new smoking ordinance

If you work in Los Angeles and smoke, you’d better start watching your flanks.

Your nonsmoking colleagues can now tell you to get out of their space, they can have your desk moved, they can complain about you to the boss--and if all else fails, they can have you hauled before the city attorney, or even into court if you won’t cooperate.

Monday is the first full workday for Los Angeles under a tough new anti-smoking ordinance aimed at protecting those who don’t smoke at work from the ill effects of those who do.

Under the new ordinance, which took effect Saturday, smoking no longer is permitted in company elevators, medical facilities, restrooms and two-thirds of all lounge areas, cafeterias and lunchrooms. In addition, businesses with five or more employees must provide “to the maximum extent possible” a smoke-free work area for those who want one.

City Offices

The law also extends to city government offices--except the one where the politicians who passed the law work. It covers fire trucks, firehouses, and squad cars.

Even Patrolman Ronald (Cigar) Curry, who’s been chewing on stogies for more than a decade, is not looking forward to Monday.

“A lot of the nonsmokers are waiting for me and threatening me,” says Curry, a crusty cop whose beat is the toughest part of Main Street along Skid Row. “Well, they’re just going to have to set up a special area for me!”

Curry says to honor the law he’ll be “happy” to dangle his specially hand-rolled La Platas out the window of the patrol car and exhale the smoke in the same direction, but only if “my partner has some kind of health problem.” Otherwise, says Cigar--whose nickname comes from the bums on the Row--it’s every nonsmoker for him or herself.

Most Comply

“If they tell me to put out my cigar, I’ll look at them and say, ‘You want me to do what? “‘ Curry growled.

Cigar Curry notwithstanding, a Times survey of two dozen local businesses found general compliance, with companies busy plastering their restrooms and lounge areas with bold red and black signs: “No Smoking. L.A.M.C. 41.50.”

Some companies have purchased air filters for smokers’ desks. A few have put up partitions or moved air vents. Some have shifted employees to different areas and most companies have handed out written rules so that everyone knows what’s expected of them.

But the real impact of the new law is not on the businesses--indeed, after heavy lobbying by the tobacco industry and big business, the law makes it clear that “employers are not required to incur any expense to make structural or physical modifications” to provide no-smoking areas.

The biggest impact is on the people. Specifically, smokers.

They say they are getting tired of hearing about where they can smoke and where they can’t--they say they are quitting or trying to quit or cutting back or, at the very least, altering their smoking habits. They say they are reacting not only to fellow workers, but to their own nagging doubts about the habit.

Some feel coerced:

“Hell, if they want me to stop smoking in here, I’ll stop, for chrissakes,” barked one beleaguered real estate saleswoman in the San Fernando Valley, when asked her reaction to the new ordinance. Some are philosophical:

“It’s a nasty, dirty habit and . . . I wouldn’t want to be stuck sitting next to someone blowing smoke all day, either,” said Paula Gilpin, standing far from her co-workers, puffing away in a hallway of the Pacific Stock Exchange building so that her smoke drifted out a window into an alley.

Some are angry and resigned at the same time:

“Hell, this is America. Smokers have a right to live the way they want, don’t they?” snapped Vern, an outspoken stationery salesman, who didn’t want his last name used. “These crusading nonsmokers are worse than born-again Christians. I love smoking. I love it. And I’m not going to quit.”

Many Have Quit

So what about the new law? “Oh, I don’t mind not smoking on the job,” Vern added, somewhat meekly. “It can be clumsy in an office if others don’t like it. When I want a cigarette that bad, I can always step out the door.”

And some longtime smokers say they’ve quit cold turkey.

Take Mary Folks:

“I had cancer and that didn’t scare me away from cigarettes,” the 56-year-old grandmother boasted the other day, sitting in her small travel agency in Sherman Oaks. “I had bronchitis, too, and I live with a nonsmoker, and that didn’t make me quit,” she said. “But when they started charging $10 a carton, well, I got mad.”

Then came the new ordinance. Folks was against it when it was signed into law by Mayor Tom Bradley last December. She didn’t believe the City Council had any business legislating smokers’ rights. But the months of public haggling between tobacco lobbyists and anti-smoking groups took its subtle toll on her, Folks said.

“Society’s been working on me for a long time, I think . . . it’s just too damn hard on smokers these days. It got so I didn’t feel good about smoking anymore . . . . I felt stupid,” Folks said. So a few weeks ago, after 35 years, she quit.

She sits at her desk now, no longer shrouded by the columns of smoke that used to curl past the brightly colored travel posters and into her co-workers’ lungs. The air is cleaner. Folks says she feels “a little grouchy” but “just great.”

The ordinance’s results have put a smile on the face of anti-smoking activist Councilman Marvin Braude.

“Every time I go out walking on the beach or along the bike path, people come up to me and say, ‘Thank you for the ordinance. I’ve been struggling for years trying to kick this addiction, and now I’ve been able to,’ ” Braude boasts.

Kicked Habit

“Or they will say, ‘I think your ordinance is going to help me quit because there won’t be so much pressure in the office to smoke.’ And whenever you hear from one person, you know there are a couple of thousand more doing the same thing,” Braude adds.

The councilman--who kicked a two-pack-a-day habit himself 30 years ago while driving to California from Chicago “to start a new life”--also hears from grateful bosses “who got tired of trying to arbitrate disputes between smokers and nonsmokers. Now they say, ‘Thank you for giving us . . . a mechanism that will work.’ ”

So far, Braude says he has heard few gripes about the new law from any side--smokers, nonsmokers or employers.

At the 4,700-employee Transamerica Occidental Life Insurance Co., the firm has purchased 25 to 30 smokeless ashtrays for use in areas where employees work in close quarters and can’t be moved. The firm, which has been implementing a companywide smoking policy since last March, also put up some 15 partitions in various work areas to separate smokers from nonsmokers. Company officials also report solid attendance at stop-smoking classes, which are held on company time.

In-house stop-smoking classes also will be offered soon at the 11,000-employee Pacific Bell regional headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, where posted signs and memos have alerted workers about its smoking policy.

Signs and memos also have been issued for workers at Atlantic Richfield Co. and the Los Angeles Times, and meetings were held at Bullock’s stores to inform employees about the rules.

Some offices have decided to prohibit smoking altogether. At the Los Angeles chapter of the American Heart Assn., the executive board has recommended a total ban on smoking for the estimated 15% of the association’s 58 employees who smoke.

Council Horseshoe

However, in the “horseshoe” area of the City Council chambers, where the 15 council members sit, the panel’s lone steady smoker, Art Snyder, and its two occasional cigar users, David Cunningham and John Ferraro, can smoke with impunity.

“In the horseshoe, there are no rules,” Braude explained. (Two other notable smoke-filled work areas are in Sacramento, where state legislators also can smoke freely at their desks in the Senate and Assembly chambers, despite strict no smoking rules in other parts of the State Capitol.)

But compromise is becoming the rule elsewhere, especially in work areas where employees cannot be physically separated by partitions or walls, in small offices and shops and firehouses.

“We’ve just been telling the smokers they’ll have to go outside, that’s all,” said battalion aide Damon Bell, who resides with 11 other firemen--including three smokers--at Firehouse No. 71 on Beverly Glen Boulevard and Sunset. “Actually, we don’t anticipate any problems at all,” Bell said. “Our smokers are pretty considerate.”

The compromises sometimes are trickier when the boss is a smoker and the employee isn’t.

“Personally I loathe smoking, so if it bothers me, I can always tell her to put it out,” said the secretary to a chain-smoking physician.

Asked how many times she’d made such a request in the eight years she’s been working for the doctor, the secretary replied: “Never.”

“It’s funny how good a person’s smoke can smell if they’re the boss,” quipped another office worker.

Boss Relented

But in the case of tobacco-using employees at the Air France cargo office on Century Boulevard, it was the nonsmoking boss who had to relent.

Joe Miller, Western regional cargo manager for the airline, followed the ordinance’s heated journey through the City Council, and the day after Bradley signed the measure, declared his whole office off limits to smoking. The smokers were fuming. Three months passed that way. “They became very adamant,” Miller recalls.

Finally, negotiations started. Nonsmokers, who had worked now one-fourth of a year alongside frustrated smokers, agreed there should be a smoking area. For their part, smokers agreed to be considerate.

Miller says he is happy with the compact. “Everyone learned from each other,” he said, adding that at least one worker--”one of the most militant smokers”--has announced he is cutting back.

At the Norelco service store on West 7th Street in downtown Los Angeles, where two of the four employees smoke, the smokers have agreed to turn on some of their own merchandise--the firm sells air filters--when they get the urge to light up. Manager Gordon Watson, 33, a smoker for 15 years, says: “I’m all for this law. If you’re someone who doesn’t smoke, you need a law to help you.”

Desk Filter

Watson says sales of a foot-high desk model air filter have doubled since the smoking law was signed by Bradley in mid-December. Some stores report selling out their entire stock of portable air filters, with buyers ranging from large companies to individual smokers and nonsmokers.

At the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, Louella Welch says she does not know what part the new ordinance played, but the most recent stop-smoking class “was one of the largest ever”--up from an average of 30 people to around 60. At Shick Center for the Control of Smoking, Gary Smith said there has been a noticeable increase in inquiries about the $545 classes. Shick landed one fat contract from a Sylmar medical technology firm, which is putting 40 smoking employees through the program for a discounted fee of $395 each.

This also is bonanza time for merchandiser Jeannette Orel of Santa Monica, who 10 years ago invented the nation’s first “smokeless ashtray.” Not only is Orel “thrilled to be living through this social change and thrilled that workers will now breathe less dangerous side smoke,” she says she also is thrilled to have her small “Smoke Trapper” company finally making big profits.

At the Tinder Box tobacco store in downtown Los Angeles, manager Sergio Parra reports sales of tobacco down 25% to 30% since December, with sales of Orel’s smokeless ashtray up 100%.

No one is likely to be punished for non-compliance with the new Los Angeles law, if history is an indicator. According to Charles Mawson, director of the Berkeley-based Californians for Nonsmokers Rights, no smoker or employer has yet been prosecuted in California on an anti-smoking violation.

Few Complaints

In the two largest California cities with workplace smoking ordinances, relatively few complaints have been initiated: 140 (out of about 102,000 licensed businesses) in one year in San Francisco; 81 (out of 50,000 licensed businesses) since July in San Diego.

In Los Angeles, failure of a firm to establish some kind of smoking policy is punishable by a $500 fine, six months in jail, or both. The ordinance prohibits retaliation against an employee for trying to enforce the law. Smokers who violate the ordinance are subject to fines between $50 and $100.

But Braude expects the new law to be totally self-policing. “This will allow people to come out of the closet who before have been fearful of asking people not to smoke,” the councilman said.

One Angeleno who won’t be complaining come Monday is Hilda Romero, a native of El Salvador, who grew up in a tobacco shop.

Today, Romero works at the La Plata cigar factory near 10th and South Grand streets. There are 10 employees and all of them except Romero are smokers.

So how do you compromise over smoking in a cigar factory? Very diplomatically, chuckles Romero.

“Here, the majority rules,” she said. “I open the windows.” COMPLAINING ABOUT SMOKING

To file a complaint about an employer, you must first contact the city attorney’s office, where a law clerk will provide information about compliance and enforcement to deliver to the offending boss. If the problem goes unresolved, a hearing may be scheduled and an investigation conducted by the city Building and Safety Department.

If there still is no satisfaction, the city attorney may file a complaint against the employer, to be settled in Municipal Court.

To enforce the law against an individual smoker, a complaint may be filed with the Los Angeles Police Department, which would turn the matter over to the city attorney’s office for disposition in court.

DR