The Smoking Lamp Is Definitely Not Lit : Firms in Northwest Lead Nation in Imposing Total Ban on Lighting Up in the Workplace
It begins, almost furtively, every weekday when the lunchtime rush starts and some of the 3,000 employees who work in the downtown headquarters of Pacific Northwest Bell step out at street level onto a pleasant plaza.
Instead of rushing off to nearby restaurants like their co-workers, they stop on the plaza, pull out cigarettes and light up. It has become a daily ritual since last October when Pacific Northwest Bell became one of the first big companies in the nation to institute a ban on all smoking.
In Pacific Northwest Bell’s case, this includes 15,000 workers, in 800 buildings spread across Washington, Oregon and northern Idaho.
There is not a single smoking lounge, not one smoking area and no exceptions for executives in private offices. The company cafeteria is entirely smoke-free, just like everywhere else. Pacific Northwest Bell smokers must go outside to do so--directors and vice presidents included, thank you very much.
Variety of Programs
For those who want to quit, the company will pay the cost of any of a variety of smoking cessation programs--including aversion therapy, acupuncture and hypnosis--for any employee or employee’s family member. So far, the bill for the nearly 1,300 workers and more than 350 family members who have enrolled amounts to more than $250,000.
There’s still a little grumbling among tobacco-using workers. Some of the smokers puffing away at lunchtime on a recent sunny day griped about the company’s decision not to provide even a single smoking lounge. But, by the same token, there appeared to be at least grudging acceptance--even by the smokers--that what the phone company has done here is for the best.
And Pacific Northwest Bell is less and less unusual in its aggressive and complete ban on smoking. Spurred by concern over health and accident insurance costs--smokers ring up far larger hospital bills and pose twice the risk of on-job accidents as non-smokers, according to a number of studies--companies here in the Northwest and, increasingly, across the country are discarding complex smoking policies in favor of a simpler dictum: Don’t.
The appeal to the bottom line has been intensified by a variety of studies--some of them conducted at the Smoking Policy Institute, an independent foundation that began its existence not in a medical institution but at the Albers School of Business at Seattle University.
The research has concluded that unnecessarily increased insurance costs, absenteeism, reduced productivity and other factors mean that a smoking worker cost his or her employer $4,500 more each year than a non-smoker. But the Smoking Policy Institute estimate is higher than those made in other studies, which have pegged the direct costs per smoker at between $336 and $601 a year.
Total Ban Studied
Boeing Co. has already eliminated smoking in subsidiaries that employ 16,000 of its 113,000 workers and is studying a total company-wide ban. Boeing started studying the issue after one of its top officers told some of his subordinates that he couldn’t understand why the company had so-called “clean rooms” for its computers but wasn’t as fastidious about what its human employees breathed.
Boeing is especially sensitive to an analogy about smoking drawn often by Neal Sofian, a smoking policy consultant at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound, a large health maintenance organization here. Group Health has developed a side business helping corporations eliminate smoking on the job. Sofian likes to observe that smoking kills 360,000 people a year--the equivalent of three Boeing 747 jetliners crashing every day.
In 1984, Group Health eliminated smoking in two of its three hospitals, except in small separately ventilated rooms that are available to workers on the night shift only because the health centers in question are in neighborhoods where stepping outside after dark might not be safe.
The trend to not just limiting, but wiping out smoking in the workplace, has spilled over into the news business. The biggest local paper, the Seattle Times, and two of the city’s major television stations have banned smoking by all of their workers.
The Times was joined by the smaller Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Denver Post and, in each case, papers have continued to be delivered and programs have been broadcast without interruption.
And the movement seems to be gathering momentum. On Sept. 29, for instance, the 2,700 employees at the Thousand Oaks, Calif., headquarters complex of General Telephone of California were notified that, effective Jan. 1, smoking will be prohibited except in a small area of a cafeteria that has its own ventilation system.
General Telephone, a spokesman said, will study ways it may extend the total smoking ban to all of its 25,000 workers.
Phased Program
And two days after General Telephone’s announcement, Seattle’s Rainier Bancorp., with 5,700 workers in offices in six states--Washington, Alaska, California, New York, Oregon and Arizona--eliminated smoking completely when the last step became effective in a phased program that began a year ago. The Rainier policy applies to workers only, but a state law here had already made it illegal for customers to smoke in banks.
Last June, the Bureau of National Affairs, a private, Washington-based consulting firm, released results of a national employer survey that found 40% of 662 U.S. companies polled banned smoking in all open work areas, with 6% prohibiting smoking anywhere on company property. The survey found most smoking policies had been adopted in the last five years but did not speculate on the pace of the trend toward complete work-site smoking prohibition.
So far, Pacific Northwest Bell remains perhaps the most significant example of a big company that chose complete work-site abstinence as the best available method of ridding itself of what had been an ongoing worker controversy over who could smoke, how much and where. As such, said Robert Rosner, the Smoking Policy Institute’s executive director, Pacific Northwest Bell is representative of the dilemma smoking has become for thousands of American companies, large and small.
Both Rosner and Sofian agreed that in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, where companies have implemented smoking control policies to conform to recently enacted local smoking ordinances, firms often follow local laws rather than taking more stringent action.
(The Los Angeles Times, which, like the Denver Post is a subsidiary of the Times Mirror Co., has a policy that permits smoking in portions of open work areas and restricts smoking in some areas, including elevators and part of a company cafeteria.)
‘The Bottom Line’
“Pacific Northwest Bell is very important,” said Rosner, who helped the company form its no-smoking policy, “because the bottom line is that we don’t normally tend to think about the phone company as being a leader in social issues like this.”
Pacific Northwest Bell, Rosner noted, is symbolically more important than hospitals and other health facilities that ban smoking because the public, he contended, increasingly expects medical enterprises to eliminate smoking. In Southern California, Loma Linda University Medical Center has never permitted tobacco use and, this past August, Harbor-UCLA Medical Center imposed a complete smoking ban, too, in a program that could see the same strictures extended throughout the county hospital and clinic system, a spokesman said.
For the phone company here, though, the issue began to come to a head in January of 1983, recalled Len Beil, PNB’s manager of human resources planning. Like many companies, PNB had undergone the internal turmoil of trying to shape a smoking policy that would satisfy both smokers and nonsmokers. Smokers constituted just 28% of the firm’s workers, a company survey found.
PNB had decided to permit individual departments to vote on their own smoking rules, only to find, Beil recalled, that smokers in departments that severely restricted tobacco use would simply walk to a nearby less-restrictive department to light up. “We had been flooded with letters to our officers and communications to our employee suggestion program,” Beil said.
Smoking at PNB had become what it is at many companies--the most emotional routine employee issue of all. “One year, we even gave away 10 turkeys to people who would quit cold turkey,” Beil said. “But finally, we realized we just had to do something more.”
A Reformed Smoker
The cause was helped greatly, Beil said, by the fact that PNB’s up-from-the-ranks president, Andy Smith, is a reformed--previously heavy--smoker who once flicked ashes out the window of a company car while driving across a bridge near Astoria, Ore., and discovered when he got to the other end that the ash had blown into the back seat and the vehicle was ablaze.
Terrified he would be immediately fired, Smith doused the fire and avoided discharge. Eventually, Beil and Rosner said, Smith quit smoking, became president and came to perceive the ongoing controversy over smoking as simply an unnecessary waste of his time.
In 1984, PNB formed an employee committee to study its smoking policy situation, relying on a formula Rosner said is increasingly common: Instead of according smokers and non-smokers equal voice on the committee, the phone company named smokers, non-smokers and former smokers to the group in equal numbers, deciding that was more representative of the employee population.
Among the issues the company had to face was an argument it had long heard: That people have a legal right to smoke on the job and that any company overly restricting that right might face litigation from its workers. But what the company, Rosner’s foundation and Group Health all eventually concluded, through legal research, was that the concern was ill-founded.
‘It Is a Privilege’
“Smoking is clearly not a right; it is a privilege,” Rosner said. “It can be extended to workers by a union contract or by the employer. In fact, the group with the best grounds to sue you is the non - smokers .”
(Even the Tobacco Institute, the Washington lobby for the cigarette industry, does not believe there is a necessarily guaranteed right to smoke. Walker Merryman, an institute spokesman, complained, however, that bans on smoking and refusal to hire smokers often go hand in hand--a question, Merryman said, that raises civil rights issues. “It would seem to me that you might very well be sacrificing some employee morale and productivity through a ban on smoking, simply by virtue of the fact that those who enjoy smoking are going to find opportunities to do so during the work day,” Merryman said.)
Still, PNB feared forceful action might bring about a confrontation with the unions that represent the vast majority of its employees--especially the Communications Workers of America, which has 8,000 members in the company. In April of last year, though, the CWA regional headquarters distributed a memo to the presidents of all union locals acknowledging that PNB proposed to ban all smoking and signaling that the CWA would not launch any fight for smokers’ rights because doing so might expose the union to lawsuits by non-smokers--court action the union could not win.
Surprised by Union Decision
PNB, Beil said, was surprised by the union decision but recognized that it cleared the last obstacle to total elimination of smoking.
Harry Ibsen, the CWA’s district vice president, said the union successfully pressured management to pay the entire cost of smoking cessation programs for all of its workers--a characterization with which Beil agreed. “We had a lot of our own members telling us they wanted something done about smoking,” Ibsen recalled.
Remarkably Few Incidents
The smoking ban went into effect on Oct. 15, 1985, three months after it was announced. Except for some scattered protests, Beil and the CWA said, implementation of the new policy was remarkably incident-free. Of 15,000 employees, just 42 filed formal protests, with some of those later retracted.
“From my perspective, it went fairly swimmingly,” said Annette Fehrenbach, a psychologist who works as a consultant in PNB’s employee health department.
The policy bans smoking in all PNB buildings but permits it in some company vehicles under some circumstances. Crews working outdoors are not included in the ban. Both of those exceptions were made because of what PNB said would be extreme difficulties in enforcing the ban in moving trucks and at remote job sites.
Watched With Interest
PNB’s parent firm, Denver-based US West, watched PNB’s program with great interest--especially because US West management was concerned that smokers on its own board of directors might balk at extending the strict PNB policy throughout the company. As things turned out, said Bill Ingram, a US West personnel executive, that opposition failed to materialize.
Within the last month, US West has restricted smoking in its four-floor Denver headquarters offices to one room on each floor--with each room removed from the common building ventilation system so smoke is not blown to the work stations of non-smokers. Northwestern Bell, another US West subsidiary, is currently implementing strict smoking policies in the five states where it does business.
