Hearing Addresses Concerns About Drug Testing in Workplace

Calling the issue of workplace drug testing “a real mine field,” a Garden Grove manufacturer whose business is vulnerable to on-the-job injuries asked for guidance Tuesday from state legislators.

Employers are in a bind, Warren Gay, vice president and general manager of American Metal Bearings, told a special joint legislative hearing in Orange. Although companies need a device by which they can control the use of dangerous drugs by workers, he said, courts and lawyers have created a cloud of confusion.

“I have rarely stood up like this and asked for help,” Gay said. “But I need the help of government in this instance.”

Gay was among 10 representatives of business, labor, schools, testing laboratories and law who testified about drug testing before the first joint hearing of Sen. John Seymour’s Select Committee on Drug and Alcohol Abuse and Assemblyman Johan Klehs’ subcommittee on Employer Assistance Programs and Drug and Alcohol Abuse.

Seymour (R-Anaheim) said Gay’s testimony underscored his concern for the issue.

With no current law, “employers are flying blind, and employees have no protection,” he said. “Unless there is legislation, the law will be written by the courts.”

Seymour earlier this year authored a bill to allow random workplace drug testing. The measure was shelved, but after four more hearings throughout the state on the issue, he plans to rewrite his bill and introduce it again, he said.

‘Question of How’

Citing reports that 30% of the Fortune 500 companies now have drug-testing programs--a figure that he said is expected to grow to 41% in two years--Seymour said: “There is no question of whether substance abuse testing will take place. It’s a question of how.”

Seymour said Tuesday that he remains convinced of the necessity for a state law setting guidelines for workplace and pre-employment drug and alcohol testing. He believes all employers should have the right to test employees when there is evidence of substance abuse, but he said he is backing away from the idea of indiscriminate random testing.

Random testing perhaps should be restricted to “places where there is a high degree of risk to public safety,” he said. Those groups might include nuclear power plant workers, bus drivers, air traffic controllers and possibly truck drivers hauling toxic or combustible loads, he said.

But Gary Williams, staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the legislators that mandatory employer-sponsored drug testing violates personal liberties, including the constitutional right to privacy.

It is “unfair and unreasonable to force millions of American workers who are not even suspected of using drugs, and whose job performance is satisfactory, to submit to degrading and intrusive urine tests on a regular basis. It is unfair to treat the innocent and the guilty alike,” Williams said.

“Job performance is the bottom line. If you cannot do the job, you get fired. But urine tests do not measure job performance,” he said. Drug testing is “a form of surveillance. . . . It is George Orwell’s ‘1984’ come to life.”

‘Blame-the-Victim Mentality’

Marvin Brody, a consultant to the United Auto Workers, said his union rejects “the philosophy advocated by some that drug testing is the answer. That engenders a blame-the-victim mentality.”

If an employee is abusing drugs, it will be revealed in job performance, Brody said. Instead of bringing in urine specimen bottles, businesses should be establishing treatment programs, he said. With treatment programs, both employees and employers benefit, he said.

But Tustin Mayor Donald J. Saltarelli, whose proposal for mandatory drug testing for all city employees was approved by the City Council, testified that drug testing is a “moral and economic” issue. Government employees should set an example for the public, he said. Further, in an era of escalating liability costs, cities are leaving themselves legally liable unless they are assured that employees are drug-free, he said.

“Who protects the taxpayer?” he asked the legislators.

Testing does not have to be mandatory to work, the football coach and team physician at Edison High School in Huntington Beach testified.

That school’s confidential and entirely voluntary drug testing program for its football players has garnered 90% participation and created a mechanism to combat peer pressure at parties where drugs are present, Coach Randy Williams said. Test results go no farther than the team physician and the players’ parents, but so far there has been no evidence of drug use among the participants, said team physician Dr. Robert Belanger.

Psychologist Andrew Berner told the legislators that public opposition to drug testing “stems from fear”--fear of inaccurate laboratory results, of being falsely labeled a drug addict and of confidentiality breaches. People fear that employers will use the tests in an “arbitrary fashion,” when there is no evidence of drug use or that they will be subjected to “dehumanizing behavior,” of being watched during private functions, he said.

Safeguards Urged

The “little guy” feels that this is “just one more way . . . to push around the blue-collar worker,” Berner said. He urged legislators to write safeguards into the law, ensuring the validity of laboratory results and requiring employers to have written policies spelling out employees’ rights.

Seymour’s earlier bill would have permitted drug testing of all job applicants and of existing employees “for reasonable cause.” The bill also permitted random drug testing in the private workplace.

Assemblyman Klehs (D-San Leandro) introduced a bill last session establishing standards for laboratories performing drug tests. It was vetoed by Gov. George Deukmejian.

Additional joint hearings on the issue of drug testing are scheduled for Oct. 14 in San Francisco, Oct. 16 in Los Angeles, Oct. 27 in Sacramento and Oct. 28 in San Diego.