Bans, Red Ink : Smoking: A Burning Work Issue

Last month, Pacific Northwest Bell, a Seattle-based telecommunications company with about 15,000 employees--25% of whom are smokers--became one of the largest private employers to ban smoking in any of its facilities.

Employees “have to go outside if they want to smoke,” said Northwest Bell spokesman Jim Mozmette, noting that that may be an unpleasant prospect because it rains so often in the Pacific Northwest.

The company took the action after conducting a survey that found that 77% of all employees--and 57% of those who smoke--wanted a policy regulating smoking in their work areas.

“You don’t have a smoking policy like ours work unless you have unanimous support among the employees,” Mozmette said. There have been no formal complaints about the new policy so far, he said.

No Smokers Hired

At Radar Electric, a Seattle-based industrial parts distribution outlet, management takes the no-smoking concept one step further: It simply will not hire smokers.

The question, “Do you smoke?” is written in red ink across the top of its application forms. If the answer is “yes,” the applicant is told that he will not be hired. The company has never faced a legal challenge over its no-smoking hiring policy, owner Wilbur McPherson said.

Emboldened by state laws and local ordinances regulating smoking in specific areas of the workplace, some employers are going beyond that, prohibiting smoking in office buildings and refusing to hire workers who smoke.

Workplace smoking bans add to the social pressure on smokers, who already are confronted with irritated co-workers and such anti-smoking campaigns as today’s “Great American Smoke Out,” sponsored annually by the American Cancer Society to encourage smokers to quit their habit for at least 24 hours.

Added Costs Cited

Companies justify no-smoking policies on grounds that employees who smoke--either on the job or off--cost too much money in health-care benefits, lost productivity and the maintenance that is required for cleaning up ashes and repairing cigarette burns in office floors.

Some observers say, however, that the bans are part of a broader trend in which employers have adopted a more forceful and intrusive attitude toward employees’ personal habits. As medical costs have risen--to 9.1% of pretax profits in 1983 from 3% in 1970, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics--firms are pressing harder for medical information when hiring a prospective employee.

Where once few companies dared to inquire about an applicant’s personal life style, for instance, thousands of companies now give tests for illegal drugs, prepare long psychological profiles, administer lie-detector tests--and ask if applicants smoke.

“Employers want to know more about their employees--their personal habits,” said Robert Schuler, an associate business professor at New York University. “More and more companies are deciding that a smoking employee costs an organization money. . . . The companies are defining work performance not only by how well somebody performs their job but also whether the person is a good corporate citizen.”

Employers contend that discrimination against smokers is legal. Smoking is not an immutable physical or personal characteristic, such as race, nationality, sex or physical handicap, noted John F. Banzaff, a law professor at George Washington University and executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, a Washington-based anti-smoking group.

“You can’t change your race, you can’t change your nationality or sex,” Banzaff said, “. . . but you can choose not to smoke.”

Los Angeles Deputy City Atty. Bruce Coplen, who oversees enforcement of the city’s smoking ordinance, added: “Generally, companies have wide latitude to regulate company policy with regard to smoking. They could declare the entire premises to be nonsmoking so long as they are not compromising any existing union contracts” or other binding agreement.

Sometimes, however, there are showdowns.

Karl Lichtenberger, who quit smoking 25 years ago and whose office machine firm in Lake Bluff, Ill., advertises itself as a “no-smoking company” in local newspaper ads, became suspicious two years ago when his newly hired secretary began closeting herself in the company bathroom “four and five times a day.”

Lichtenberger, president of Westminster Office Machines--a company where none of the 30 employees are allowed to smoke inside the building--said he had hired the woman only after she assured him during her job interview that she did not smoke.

But, he said, “you could tell from the smell (in the bathroom) she was in there smoking. I told her either she had to quit smoking or she’d be fired. A week or so later she left” on her own accord.

Eight years ago, the Fire Department in Alexandria, Va., became one of the first employers in the nation to ban smoking on--or off--the job when it required as a condition of employment that new firefighters sign papers pledging that they would not smoke on or off duty.

“We initiated the regulation because the cost of disability pensions was getting out of sight,” said former Alexandria Fire Chief Charles E. Rule, a Fire Department consultant. At the time the regulation was adopted, there was only one smoker in the department. Neither he nor anyone else has challenged the regulation in court.

Terry Hansen, who oversees the smoking-cessation program at St. Helena Hospital in Deer Park, Calif., said: “I’ve . . . had companies tell me that if they have two applicants of roughly equal credentials, they’ll hire the nonsmoker.”

Observers are split on whether banning smoking on the job significantly improves worker productivity and reduces health care costs.

On one side is a host of federal agencies and such anti-smoking advocates as the Washington Business Group on Health. The business health lobby group said smokers cost American companies $26 billion in lost productivity annually and $16 billion in medical costs because smokers are absent from work and get sick more often than nonsmokers.

“It’s to your advantage to have nonsmokers on the payroll in order to keep health-care costs from going through the roof,” said William Bloomfield, president of Webb Service, a Redondo Beach laundry machine company where no smokers are hired.

One study, for example, estimated that a cigarette smoker uses 30 minutes per work day attending to his habit. Pipe smokers average 55 minutes per work day on their smoking ritual. U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koops, who calls smokers “simply bad business,” has said smokers visit doctors 50% more than nonsmokers, use health insurance benefits 50% more often and have twice the death rate of their nonsmoking colleagues.

On the other side are a mixture of tobacco industry representatives and academicians who describe such claims as unsubstantiated. They assert that smoking policies can themselves be wasteful and inefficient if they prompt companies to hire less-qualified or less-productive workers.

“It’s going to be a rare employer indeed that instead of looking for the best candidate for a particular job decides to focus his attention on whether the applicant smokes,” said John Rupp, a partner with the Washington law firm Covington & Burling, which represents the American Tobacco Institute. “That’s inefficient and makes no more sense than asking the applicant whether he drives a Ford or Chevy.”

The claim of anti-smoking advocates that banning smoking in the workplace cuts health insurance costs is not necessarily true, according to health insurance industry representatives.

Although it is widely accepted that smoking adversely affects health, insurance industry representatives say most health insurance rates are primarily based on the sex, age, location and overall health of the workers being insured, not on whether they smoke.

“There is no way currently that we can break out the different health habits,” said Bill Hunter, a spokesman for Blue Cross of California, the state’s largest health insurer. “Smoking may affect the group’s overall rating, but we don’t use it as the only factor.”

Jeffrey H. Miles, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Assn. of Health Underwriters, added that although a few health insurance companies offer 5% to 15% discounts to companies that ban smoking, most insurance firms still do not offer discounts.

The productivity losses ascribed to smokers have also been questioned by researchers and even by anti-smoking groups.

Louis Solmon, dean of UCLA’s graduate school of education, and anti-smoking advocate Banzaff both decry the methodology of studies that purport to measure smokers’ lack of productivity by tracking the time it takes to light a cigarette.

“It’s misleading to assert that just because somebody is lighting a cigarette he is not doing any productive work,” Banzaff said.

A 1984 study conducted by Tor Dahl, a health economist at the University of Minnesota, found in a survey of 53 bank credit managers that those managers who smoked were slightly more productive than their counterparts.

Dahl, a nonsmoker who said he was displeased by his findings, theorizes that smokers tend to have addictive personalities and “may be addicted to their work.”

“That’s no reason to take up smoking,” Dahl said of his findings. “It’s hard to be productive when later on (in life) you are dying of lung cancer or heart disease.”

Little Court Action

Employers generally have had free reign to set policy on smoking, because the federal courts--which have focused on such workplace issues as employment discrimination and comparable worth--have not had occasion to establish a firm legal framework on the smoking issue.

Even the nation’s leading champion of individual rights, the American Civil Liberties Union, has not chosen sides.

“We do not have a position, nationally,” said Alan Reitman, associate director of the national ACLU office in New York. Both smoking and prohibitions against it raise civil liberties issues, Reitman said. “We have a committee trying to sort all of that out now.”

The amount of regulation of smoking in the workplace is hard to measure because companies are not required to report such data. There is, however, evidence of concern about the issue.

About eight states and more than 100 cities nationwide regulate smoking to some degree in the workplace, according to Action on Smoking and Health.

Yet a 1984 survey of smoking policies at Fortune 500 companies found that two-thirds of the 445 companies that responded to the study had no formal smoking policy. Four companies said they refuse to hire smokers. The survey was paid for by the Tobacco Institute of America and conducted by Solmon.

More Bans Cited

Despite those figures, anti-smoking groups say the number of firms that ban smoking has risen among small- and medium-sized companies. Among them are Provident Indemnity Life Insurance Co. in Norristown, Pa., Pro-Tec, a Bellevue, Wash., firm that makes protective helmets, and Los Angeles-based Merle Norman Cosmetics, which has banned smoking by its 1,100 employees since 1975.

Attitudes about smoking have clearly changed at many companies since the 1964 surgeon general’s report became the first major government-sponsored study to link smoking with such health hazards as lung cancer and heart disease. Since that report, the percentage of American smokers has dropped from an estimated 42% of the population to about one-third today.

Recent surveys by the federal Centers for Disease Control, the surgeon general’s office and other health agencies show that among more highly educated professionals--those typically responsible for managing employees and setting company policy--the drop in smoking has been even more dramatic. A CDC study issued in June, for example, found that only 15% of men and 12% of women with college degrees smoked.