Starting on May 1, a Pennsylvania hospital will stop hiring new employees who are smokers in an effort to reduce health care costs — an example of how ethnic minorities, pregnant women and many other groups are protected from discrimination in the workplace, but smokers aren't.
It's as pointless as not hiring someone because he or she participates in roller derby or likes cats. It doesn't make sense and shouldn't matter.
Smokers already face discrimination by being forced to smoke in segregated areas. This discrimination is logical given the effect smokers have on others. Currently, you're legally able to drink in more places in the U.S. than smoke.
What legally happens outside of work shouldn't affect employment, plain and simple.
In the Pennsylvania case, current employees who are smokers won't be fired. In other cases, employees haven't been as lucky.
The Cleveland Clinic started testing its employees for nicotine several years ago and has since fired any employee who continues to smoke.
Even though I am a smoker myself, I can understand an employers wish to reduce health care costs. But is refusing to hire smokers, or firing employees who are smokers, the best way to do this? Why not offer cessation classes instead of a boot out the door? Or put smokers on a separate health plan with higher premiums?
Many employers offer treatment plans for alcoholics and drug addicts and give them a second chance at employment after they've successfully been rehabilitated. Smokers often don't receive these same benefits. If addiction to drugs and alcohol are medical diseases that deserve special treatment, then what is addiction to nicotine?
Currently 30 states, Indiana included, have laws against firing smokers.
Aside from the "smokers increase health insurance costs" argument, companies in those states without employment protection for smokers also claim that smoking lowers job performance. Unless you work as an athlete or your job requires a high physical well-being, being a smoker doesn't make a difference.
Performance suffers if employees use company time to take cigarette breaks, but then why not just ban smoking while on the clock? Problem solved.
As this trend grows, smokers everywhere will continue to become second-class citizens, with little or no protection from the law or their employers. What happens after every smoker is fired? Are people who live in trailer parks next?
This might sound ridiculous, but it's already starting to happen. In December, the head of the Cleveland Clinic stated if he could legally do so, he would fire every overweight employee.
Last September, a company fired an employee for having a "Vote John Kerry" on her car bumper.
Finally, in 2003, an Anheuser-Busch employee was on a date when a server mistakenly brought him a Coors Light. Not wanting to cause problems for the server, he drank the beer instead of sending it back. Someone saw him and reported him to his employer, which fired him the next day.
Makes you wonder where the line should be drawn.
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