Secondhand Smoke Still a Risk on the Job : Health: Despite restrictions on smoking at most companies, 2.2 million employees were exposed to it in 1990, a study says. Legal problems could loom for many businesses.

Although the majority of California workplaces have some type of regulation regarding smoking indoors, many fall short of a ban and expose a significant number of employees to secondhand smoke, according to a study published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Assn.

An estimated 2.2 million California workers--nearly 30% of the workforce--were exposed to environmental tobacco smoke in 1990, the study said.

The high rate of exposure could mean legal problems for employers when a report by the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is released later this year, said the study’s co-author, John P. Pierce of UC San Diego. A 1990 draft of the EPA report classified environmental tobacco smoke as a human carcinogen.

“The issue here is what’s going to happen when that report does come out,” Pierce said. “There is a liability issue. We’re talking about 2.2 million people exposed in California. It really has enormous implications. And our study says, ‘Hey, look at the size of the problem.’ ”

According to an EPA official, no decision has been reached on how environmental tobacco smoke will be classified in the final report. But studies over the past two decades have documented health hazards of secondhand tobacco smoke that include increasing the nonsmoker’s risk of lung cancer, heart disease and a range of respiratory illnesses.

The recent study was part of a larger, state-funded survey on tobacco use. In the survey, conducted in 1990, 7,162 adult, nonsmoking, indoor workers were asked whether they had been exposed to smoke in the workplace within the past two weeks.

Pierce and his colleagues found that 30% of the respondents said they were protected by a no-smoking ban in their workplaces, and 17% were protected by bans on smoking in their immediate work areas.

“Everyone else has less than that,” Pierce said. “And if you’re not banning smoking in the work area, you’re not doing anything against smoking exposure.”

The study found that nonsmokers working where there was a ban applied to work areas but not elsewhere in the building were more than 2.8 times more likely to be exposed to environmental tobacco smoke.

Where smoking was not banned from work areas, workers were eight times more likely to be exposed to environmental tobacco smoke.

Overall, 29.2% of the respondents reported exposure to tobacco smoke at their indoor work sites.

The problem of exposure to secondhand smoke is particularly acute in workplaces with fewer than 50 employees, Pierce said. Moreover, young Latino men reported more exposure than did other ethnic or racial groups, possibly because many Latinos work in those smaller companies that lack smoking regulations, the researchers suggested.

Statistics also showed that Latino men in Los Angeles were at higher risk for exposure than those elsewhere in the state.

“Los Angeles does not have the policies in place,” Pierce said. “There are just not the smoke-free regulations there.”

The study has come under the scrutiny of the Los Angeles County Tobacco Control Program. Officials there say the new data will help them target workplaces that require more smoking-cessation services. The Tobacco Control Program promotes smoke-free environments and smoking-cessation programs but has no authority to mandate smoking regulations in businesses.

“There are many more Hispanics who are working in areas that are not likely to have any smoking policies or bans at all,” says Armando Jimenez, director of the evaluation unit of the Tobacco Control Program. “This makes it more clear for us how to target workplaces.”

According to Jimenez, companies with a large number of employees are more likely to offer health insurance and advocate a smoke-free environment in order to reduce the costs of smoking-related illness.

Even in workplaces designated as “smoke-free,” more than 9% of the respondents said they had been exposed to tobacco smoke in the previous two weeks.

“It’s a major change for smokers not to smoke at the work site,” Pierce said. “But that (noncompliance) might disappear over time.”

Pierce said the number of workers exposed to environmental tobacco smoke may be underestimated in the study because many employees are not aware that smoking and nonsmoking areas, while separate, often share the same ventilation systems.