Bills on Workplace Drug Tests Shelved : Sen. Seymour Still Hopes to Win Passage in Next Year’s Session

Facing heavy opposition from organized labor and certain defeat in a state Senate committee, Sen. John Seymour on Thursday agreed to shelve for the year legislation to regulate drug testing in the workplace.

Seymour, an Anaheim Republican, had introduced two bills to authorize random drug testing of:

- Employees in sensitive jobs.

- Job applicants.

- Other employees when their supervisors have reason to suspect that these workers are doing their jobs under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

The random testing bill that applied to employees in sensitive jobs faced heavy opposition, and Seymour concluded early that it had little chance of passage this year.

Falls One Vote Short

The second bill, paired with it, applied to job applicants and the workers who fell into the category of being suspected by their supervisors of working under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Seymour had hoped that he could move that second bill through the Senate Industrial Relations Committee.

He fell one vote short of doing that Thursday, but said he still believes he can win passage of the bill during the second half of the legislative session next year. The committee vote on the bill Thursday was 4 to 1 in favor, but five votes were needed in order to move the bill out of committee before this week’s legislative deadline.

“I don’t feel good about the defeat today,” Seymour said. “I never like to lose one. On the other hand, I’m still optimistic that if the pendulum continues to swing, then by January the environment will be right.”

The more limited second bill would not mandate drug testing, but would provide guidelines for implementing it and would establish rules under which workers would have to be notified of the possibility that they might be tested. That bill would also allow employees to protest test results and to obtain second opinions from licensed laboratories using the latest technology.

Unions in Opposition

Because current law does not address drug testing in the workplace, employers have been establishing programs on a case-by-case basis, Seymour said, adding that more than one-fourth of the Fortune 500 companies in the United States already have drug-testing programs.

His bill would set consistent standards for what is already being done, Seymour said.

Labor unions, including the Teamsters, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers, the California Labor Federation, the California Teachers Assn. and the California State Employees Assn., opposed the bill. The American Civil Liberties Union was also against it.

Barry Broad, a lobbyist for the Teamsters, said the bill had several flaws, including the failure to ensure that only employees whose work is impaired by drugs are tested.

“We would want to make sure that the reasonable suspicion is a direct observation of the employer representative and not based solely on third-party reports,” Broad said. “Otherwise you get into this situation where somebody rats on another employee and says, ‘I saw Fred popping a pill in the bathroom,’ and then it’s, ‘OK, let’s test him.’ It can lead very quickly to a very unfair situation.”