THE RIGHT TO WORK--AND THE RIGHT TO WORK EFFICIENTLY

As noted in the preceding article, hiring bans on smokers are legal in many states. Workplace smoking bans are spreading throughout the land, though they're visibly counter-productive (Count them: those huddled masses yearning in office doorways). For increasing numbers of smokers, though, the doorway is too close. At the Bayfront Medical Center in St. Petersburg, FL, smoking is prohibited on the entire (16 square-block) campus, which includes city sidewalks. In fact, the closest area where smokers can smoke is a crime-infested park, where nurses have been mugged.¹ Similarly, employees of the Scott Paper Co. in Owensboro, KY, are forced to walk 2 miles to the edge of the company's property to smoke a cigarette with the warning that "immediate dismissal" will result from "any infraction." ² In the cold northeast, smoking is banned on the entire 29-acre Montgomery county (PA) campus of SmithKline Beecham (the makers of Nicorette), the 500 acre Landsdale PA campus of Merck Pharmaceuticals, and all local compuses of Comsat Telecommunications, among many others. ³ The rationale given here is not ETS, but the broader question of "image." ("People standing and smoking is not the appearance the company wants," said a spokesman for Comsat, "We want to project that we're a health-conscious company," said another corporate spokesman.) The irony of course is that smokers, by law or by company fiat, have been forced to be less efficient. It isn't just the time spent directly away form the desk, it's the rip in the concentration and the wrench that's been tossed in the works. Then too, consider this: Study after study shows that smokers, allowed to smoke, are more efficient than nonsmokers -- intellectually and physically. ⁴ So in essence what we are doing here is passing a lot of laws that turn our most productive workers into our least productive workers. Finally we get the rights of the small businessman to act as his own boss when he wants to and needs to accommodate smokers. These rights have been suspended by a string of irrational laws in which the boss acquires a boss (the state assembly, the city council) and the spirited entrepreneur becomes infantilized by the mayor and rebuked, fined or shuttered at the whims of an angry clerk. ⁵

(1) E.g. Tampa Tribune 6/10/93 and (mugging) 8/24/94. Additional coverage given to the hospital's controversial medical waste incinerator. Capable of burning 1500 pounds of medical waste per hour, the incinerator's emissions include sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, hydrochloric acid, dioxins (the stuff of Agent Orange and Times Beach), furans, lead, mercury, cadmium and carbon monoxide." (St. Petersburg Times 9/15/93) or as the Tampa Tribune put it: "Which would concern you more? A nurse standing on the sidewalk puffing a filterless Camel during a lunchbreak or that incinerator?" 9/29/93.
(2) Scott Paper, AP, 8/21/95
(3) Campus-wide bans, Philadelphia Inquirer, p.1, 3/3/96; Washington Post, 3/25/96.
(4) Smokers' performance: Biomed & Pharmacother. 48:273, 1994; Other studies referenced in Forbes Magazine 7/4/94; Orlando Sentinel 3/2/96; NY Newsday 4/5/94; NY Times 3/29/87 Med Sci Res, 1990, 18,839-840; "Pleasure: The Politics & The Reality," D.M. Warburton, 1994 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. See numerous published studies by D.M. Warburton, and Ian Hindmarch, head professor of Human Pharmacology, U. of Surrey, Milford Hospital, Godalming, Surrey, GU7 !UF, UK. Fax: (after codes) 483-418-453.
(5) Just for example, the New York City law prohibits smoking in private offices with more than 3 employees. So if all 4 employees in an office would like to smoke, then...none of them gets to smoke. These laws, like many others, offer dictatorial powers to a single nonsmoker and, again, leave enforcement to the spites of an office snitch.