Some Employers Are Saying: ‘Smokers Need Not Apply’
Talk about wellness gone wild: The push for a healthier work force has led some companies beyond the smoke-free buildings that many have adopted so enthusiastically. A few are refusing to hire smokers.
Health Net, for one, frowns on employees who smoke at work--or any place.
“We are absolutely adamant about smoking,” said Don Prial, a spokesman for Health Net, California’s second-largest health maintenance organization. “We have 1,100 employees and, to our knowledge, smoke does not pass through their lips.”
Although the Woodland Hills company stops short of a formal ban, “we discourage people who smoke from coming to work at Health Net because we don’t think they would be comfortable,” said Chairman Roger Greaves, who quit smoking 15 years ago after 25 years of lighting up. “I don’t know how many people around here are still smoking because they duck around the corner when they see me coming.”
Applicants for such full-time jobs as police officers, firefighters or lifeguards in Laguna Beach must sign pledges that they are not smokers or that they will quit smoking. The city has had that policy since 1987 because of a state labor code provision that if lung disease develops in some employees, particularly firefighters, the employer must presume that it was work related, personnel officer Phil Hoffman said.
“It wouldn’t be in our best interest to hire smokers who might develop lung problems,” Hoffman said.
Atlanta-based Turner Broadcasting System adopted a no-smokers-need-apply policy in 1986 because owner Ted Turner--even in those pre-Jane Fonda days--didn’t like the habit, said Gary McKillips, a TBS vice president. Smokers hired before 1986 were exempted from the ban, which is legal in Georgia, California and many other states.
“We wanted a smoke-free environment here for the health and well-being of the employees,” he said.
Such policies could generate some heat for companies, said Phil Gutis, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union, whose Workplace Rights Project has challenged various types of behavior curbs as violating worker privacy. Twenty-eight states prohibit job discrimination for off-duty behavior, although most apply only to smoking.
“It’s OK to ban smoking in the workplace itself, but once you get outside of the workplace, you cannot tell an employee what he or she cannot do,” Gutis said. “An employee is not a Xerox machine. You don’t own them.”
Employers who snuff out smoking acknowledge that the edict is nearly impossible to enforce. A sniff test doesn’t work, noted one, because the crackdown doesn’t extend to second-hand smoke from other household members. And most don’t extend the policy to smokers who were hired before the ban.
“I kinda wish they would,” said Kitsie Riggall, the cigarette-toting spokeswoman for Turner Broadcasting System. “Then I might quit.”
