Good thing I don't smoke or else I wouldn't have gotten hired!

Friday, July 25th, 2008. (Originally from Facebook notes)

Recently for my summer internship at CCF, I spent a week doing general and lab safety trainings, filling out massive amounts of paperwork, gotten background checks, a health screening, a TB test, and a nicotine test.

For a prestigious institution like CCF, I wasn't surprised at the procedures. However, I was perplexed as to why I needed to have a nicotine test. What did nicotine have to do with entering a job? It wasn't marijuana. I told a friend of mine about this and she guessed that since maybe I will be working closely with animals (I will be doing mouse studies), I can't run the risk of having a chemical substance (say, on my fingers) transmitted to the animal, especially if for drug studies. Hmm, maybe?

I realized that the nicotine tests were a result of a new "Smoke-free Hiring" policy implemented by CCF. Not only was the entire campus smoke-free but incoming employees can not be smokers! I was stunned at this initiative, especially for such a large institution where, who knows how many employees smoked. Although I don't smoke and am very strongly against smoking as a personal habit (for the multitude of health hazards linked to smoking), I felt it was a bit too much discrimination against others.

Or...maybe it's just a huge step toward the whole idea of a Smoke-Free environment and a more radical initiative than having mere designated smoking areas (such as at Case campus, which is smoke-free recently, with designated smoking parking lots). Luckily I hadn't touched a cigarette so I didn't have to worry about not being hired. I was thinking -- what if I was a smoker? A smoking habit is hard to break cold turkey and if more institutions are to start initiating this policy, it would be hard to find a job! I guess that would persuade people to stop smoking.... but wow.....

So I was curious about the legality of this policy and I found a straightforward explanation: http://www.law.capital.edu/Tobacco/workplace/costs_hiring.html

(Taken directly from the webpage but go to the webpage if you want to read more):

" It's your right to hire only nonsmoking employees. You have a right to protect your business from financial loss and you have an obligation to protect your employees and provide them with a safe place to work. One way to do that is to eliminate smoking and tobacco use in the workplace by only hiring employees who do not use tobacco products.

A smoke-free hiring policy can help a company control healthcare costs and other costs related to smoking, such as daily productivity losses due to smoking breaks. Even if employees do not actively smoke while at work, employers still incur costs, including higher health care expense, extra time off work due to illness, increased workers' compensation utilization, and generally lower job-related productivity. A company may also incur intangible costs associated with a smoker's personal presentation to customers or the public, especially in health-related industries.

Moreover, nicotine addicted smokers cannot truly leave their addiction at the door when they enter the workplace. Their use of nicotine and its delivery system, the cigarette, has an ongoing impact on a smoker's personality and behavior long after the last smoking inhalation. Within 30 minutes after finishing the last inhalation, a smoker is already beginning a physiologic withdrawal.

Now that Ohio law requires workplaces to be smoke-free, the repetitive withdrawal that smoking employees suffer diminishes both their productivity and affability while at work. This chronic withdrawal helps provide a rationale beyond medical care costs for requiring that employees not smoke on or off the job."