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Action on Smoking and Health
A National Legal-Action Antismoking Organization Entirely Supported by Tax-Deductible Contributions
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Companies Increasingly Saying Smokers Need Not Apply [10/12-3]
Excerpts from: Companies Increasingly Saying Smokers Need Not Apply
By Shirleen Holt Seattle Times [10/12/04]
The help-wanted ad said "non-smoker." This was a problem for Patty Hensley, who had been addicted to nicotine since the age of 14.
But she needed a job, so she pulled a ploy familiar to thousands of smokers caught between a vicious habit and a growing workplace stigma: She smoked out the car window on the way to the job interview.
Hensley, who quit for good (knock wood) last November, didn't get that job. Like many smokers, she was at a disadvantage when it came to competing for work. Rising health-insurance costs, worries about declining productivity and general disdain for the habit have turned some smoke-free workplaces into smoker-free workplaces — businesses that refuse to hire smokers at all, even if they never fire up a cigarette during work hours."We know that demographically approximately 25 percent of the adult population smokes, and that 25 percent tends to have less desirable characteristics in terms of employment," says Dieter Benz, a principal with Investors Property Management in Seattle. "Some of our people are out in the field every day and they present an image to the public. [Smoking] is not the image that we want."
Although Benz's company relies on the honor system to ferret out job candidates who smoke, others take stricter measures.
In states that allow it, such as Washington, Alaska Airlines requires potential hires to take a nicotine test before granting them a job.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department makes applicants sign an "affidavit of non-tobacco use" and to promise to "educate" citizens caught smoking within 50 feet of the building. Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories in Pullman warns on its Web site that it may fire anyone who starts smoking after being hired.
Benz, a former smoker himself, is unapologetic about his smoker-free workplace policy, as well as the rule against allowing tenants to smoke in the buildings his company manages.
Businesses have reason to worry about their employees' health. Employer-sponsored health-insurance premiums have increased by double digits for the last four years, rising nearly 14 percent in 2003. Family coverage now costs about $9,000 a year, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and individual plans an average of $3,400.
Smokers cost employers an average of $753 per year more in medical costs than nonsmokers, and miss an average of two more workdays a year than nonsmoking colleagues, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's literature states.
Activists groups contend, however, that employers are selectively targeting smokers while ignoring other health risks that cost them even more money. In a 1999 study of more than 46,000 employees, the Health Enhancement Research Organization, a national coalition of hospitals and public-health organizations, found that medical costs for workers suffering from stress, obesity or depression were higher than for employees who smoked.
"Everything we do affects our health," says Lewis Maltby, director the National Workrights Institute, a spinoff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "What you eat, whether you drink, what your hobbies are, whether you practice safe sex. If employers are allowed to control off-duty behavior when it's health-related, we will have no private lives left."
Twenty-nine states apparently shared this concern, enacting lifestyle-discrimination laws that prohibit employers from refusing to hire workers for their private, legal behaviors. This includes smoking, drinking or overeating.
Washington has no lifestyle-discrimination law, which means that employers are free to set whatever smoking policy they choose. (Smokers, like obese workers, are not protected by civil-rights laws that cover religion, race, ethnicity, age, gender or disability.)
Although it's still rare for companies to have written policies against hiring people who smoke, job recruiters say covert bias against smokers is getting stronger, particularly in a soft economy where the supply of skilled workers outpaces the demand. Jeremy Langhans, a 28-year-old job recruiter in the tech industry and occasional smoker, recalls one promising recruit who lost a shot at a good job because of his habit. Langhans noticed that the guy's paper résumé "was stinking up my office," but he recommended him anyway because the candidate was charming, professional and he wouldn't be working with the public.
"When we finally sent him out, the hiring manager said something like, 'This is a smoke-free environment and we feel your consultant would not be able to adhere to our policies.' "
The candidate never knew why he was rejected, Langhans says. Among companies that still hire smokers, many use a variety of subtle and not-so-subtle methods to discourage them from smoking during work hours and encourage them to quit altogether. Nearly 60 percent of businesses now have smoke-free workplaces, and just 19 percent have restricted-smoking policies, such as offering designated smoking areas, according to a 2003 national survey by the consulting firm Hewitt Associates.
Increasingly, companies are asking their smoking employees not to congregate outside the front door. Microsoft, for example, has a rule against smoking anywhere near the buildings.
Lowe's, the home-improvement retailer, prohibits employees from smoking on company property entirely. Some smoke in their cars or — at the Seattle store on Aurora — they walk through the parking lot so they can smoke on a side street.
Seattle wellness consultant Larry Chapman cautions employers from becoming too punitive when it comes to health matters. He conducted controlled experiments in the late 1980s in which groups of soldiers at Carswell Air Force Base competed against each other to become the healthiest team. The harsher the squadron commanders were in forcing the men to lose weight, lower their cholesterol and reduce their smoking, the more some soldiers resisted.
"They ended up putting on weight, eating lots of fatty foods and starting to smoke," says Chapman. "That was their way of rebelling." While Chapman supports the pay-to-play concept — that companies ask smokers to pay more of their health insurance premiums than nonsmokers — he says the most effective programs offer more rewards than punishments.
She remembers trying to quit at one job. She wore a nicotine patch to work, ripped it off so she could have two cigarettes with her morning coffee, then slapped it back on until the next break. Hensley, who now runs a Nicotine Anonymous support group, says some smokers are responding to the pressure by taking their habit into the closet. Their bosses don't know they smoke, she says. For that matter, neither do their friends and family.
"With the social stigma attached, there's more shame than ever before."
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