They don’t. However, other people here have been engaging in thoughtful discussion, and you pop in with some bromide that the fact that something doesn’t affect you personally makes it morally okay. Yes, most people don’t consider the effects of things that don’t directly impact them; doesn’t mean we should celebrate that attitude.
They would be “on their own” in the investigation if they swiped a pee sample or hair sample of an employee, without the employee’s knowledge. But that’s not what they are doing. They are asking the employee for the sample. The employee can refuse. There’s no sneakiness going on. The employer is not investigating “on their own.” The employee helps out by peeing in a cup and handing over the sample. Some people refuse to pee in the cup and they don’t lose their job so it’s not an absolute certainty that refusing to cooperate will cost an employee their job.
Employers make choices about whom to hire based on many things. Some of these reasons are kind of arbitrary and make no sense. If a person doesn’t “look” right, they might not be hired. Not “looking” right might not have any bearing on their ability to perform the job, but that doesn’t matter—the employer can choose not to hire them. They can discriminate against a non-protected class of people. Last I checked, drug users (being breakers of the law) were non-protected. They are not entitled to be protected from discrimination in employment, as far as I know. That’s one of the downsides of voluntarily breaking the law, I guess.
I had a random drug test several months ago (mandated because of business with the FAA), and while the civil libertarian in me railed against it mightily, the whole thing was so ridiculous that the day seemed to be right out of a slapstick comedy.
I’m generally of the opinion that almost all drugs should be legalized, but it’s kind of a “choose your battles” thing with me.
And if they say “No,” they get fired. So, tell me, yosemite, if your boss wanted you to bring in your home PC so they could poke around on your hard disk to make sure you weren’t breaking any laws, upon pain of losing your job, would you be okay with it? If not, why is your PC more sancrosact than my urinary tract?
Hey, that rhymed!
Yes, but the point is, private employers don’t get to decide who is and is not a law breaker. That’s for the courts and the courts alone to determine. If I get arrested for possesion, and can’t get to work on account of being in jail, they can fire me. If I’ve just gotten out of jail after having been convicted of drug possesion, they can refuse to hire me. If they catch me smokin’ a doob in the men’s room, they can fire me. But they cannot conduct their own tests to determine wether or not I’m a lawbreaker on my own time: they have no right to make that determination about me, no matter how accurate it might be, and no right to fire me for not going along with their witchhunt. Until I’ve been charged or convicted in a court of law, I am a protected class: I’m an American citizen, and I have a right to my privacy and my body.
How about this. Your company comes to you and offers to stop testing you if you agree purchase your own insurance. Do you agree?
Interesting point, spooje, but ultimatly a non-starter. An insurer would be within its rights to refuse to insure someone for any sort of risky behavior, legal or not. Good luck getting health insurance if you’ve been smoking a pack a day for twenty years, for example. Following that reasoning, I suppose I wouldn’t have an issue with a company refusing to insure employees who refuse drug tests. I’d have to think about it a bit, but on the surface, it seems I would be hard pressed to object to that. However, I would be opposed to expanding it past a strictly health-insurance related scenario. Refuse to piss in a cup and lose your insurance is one thing. Refuse to piss in a cup and lose your job (which is what’s going on here) is beyond the pale.
Not always. I was told that I could refuse the second drug test if I wanted. Someone else here related how they refused to do a drug test and they weren’t fired. It’s not absolute.
Well, it’s not the same thing, for a variety of reasons. For one thing, the pee is taken to a lab, and the lab only tells the employer one thing: whether or not the person had illegal drugs. Nothing else. The lab (I am assuming) cannot and will not divulge any other information about the potential employee.
The reasons for drug testing is often safety (remember my previous post where I talked about my healthcare-related job)? The employer does not want to be sued for not trying to filter out “risk factors” such as employees using illegal substances. (And believe me, at my previous job, lawsuit threats were not uncommon.) What would the employer’s justification be for seeing what’s on my PC? How would any “illegal” activity (downloading MP3s, perhaps) affect my ability to look after a vulnerable patient? What parent of a patient is going to sue an employer because an employee was downloading illegal MP3s at home? Obviously that activity (even if done while the employee was working) would not impair the employee’s reflexes or ability to handle a life-or-death healthcare crisis.
Same goes for airline pilots. So they download MP3s at home. How would that activity translate to impairing them while they are flying a plane?
Also, I’d think that “testing” a hard drive for “illegal” activity would not be remotely as cut and dried as testing for illegal drugs. (Not that drug testing is 100% cut and dried, of course . . . ) I would guess that it would be more difficult to determine with any confidence what was and was not “illegal,” and far more expensive, too.
So it doesn’t add up. I mean, I suppose an employer could ask for that (if it did not violate privacy laws—I don’t know) but since there wouldn’t be any tangible reason for wanting to see someone’s home computer (no risk of impairment on the job), nobody would stand for it. But obviously, a lot of people “stand for” drug testing, and the practice has taken hold.
But they can decide that you are probably a law breaker, and discriminate against you and not hire you. Just like they can discrimate you and not hire you because they don’t like the way you look. They are not “convicting” you of anything. They are just deciding that you are a bad bet, and that very likely you are breaking the law. Odds are that you are a law breaker, if you test postitive for illegal drugs. I mean, that’s kind of obvious.
You are not owed a job. Nobody is. Employers can arbitrarily decide to not hire you because they don’t like the color of your eyes. They can decide that you are a bad bet as an employee for a multitude of reasons.
And let’s put it in another way: having illegal drugs in your system does not mean you are automatically exempt from employers not wanting to hire you. They have a right to decide that you are a bad bet. They don’t owe you a chance.
Good to know you’re not ALWAYS cranky 
Anyway, how is the fact that a company might fire you for being found with drugs in your system “taking the law into their own hands”? It is a continuation of what they requested at the beginning of your employment with them.
In most companies, not only do they request an upfront drug screening and subsequent random tests, but they ask you on your application if you take drugs and so on.
If they test an employee and he is found to be breaking the agreement that both parties made at the beginning of their employment, how is that “taking the law into their hands”? They are protecting their rights to have drug free employees. Which is the very reason they asked the employee about drugs and for permission to do drug testing and randoms, in the first place.
They don’t then arrest the employee and take him to jail, he is let go for failure to comply with company regulations, same as if he stole, or called in sick too many times, or slept with an underling, or whatever else was spelled out to the employee in the company policies from the beginning.
Every company I’ve ever worked for spells out it’s requirements and rules in the company policies, and then you read, agree to and sign them. They even have which offenses are terminable ones.
You seem to be equating firing “you (where you is the person having a bad UA)” for an offense which they clearly spelled out as terminable as “getting to decide who is, or is not a lawbreaker”. Unless the company specifically says “you’re being fired because you broke a law” why is their action wrong if it’s done as a choice of their OWN to have drug free employees?
But I submit that the drug testing is not to enforce any type of morality as much as it is to control wildly escalating costs. Sadly, an employee’s behaviour on his own time can cost the company both money (insurance and litigation) and a tarnished image. Insurance costs are skyrocketing (the reasons *why * are still open to debate) and businesses must do whatever they can to remain competitive.
I would support the policy of ‘refuse to piss in a cup, lose your group health insurance’ myself if such a policy would convince insurers (both medical and other) to reduce the cost of premiums. But I don’t think it would.
If those on the “it is ok for the company to ask me to prove I’m not a drug user” side would bear with me, can I ask: how do you stop the slippery slope? Where do you draw the line for what you do? Not abstract stuff. Not “in general” stuff. What would your employer have to fire you for before you said, “This is a bad practice, this checking out people’s lives outside of work.”
When do you care?
Canvas Shoes also brings up an excellent point about living up to the agreements you made when you are hired.
Also, spooje brings up litigation risks, and that is the biggest concern that comes to my mind. At my old job (healthcare related), our employers were sweating bullets, hoping not to be sued over this mishap or that problem regarding patient care. If they did not try to enforce a drug-free workplace, the chances of lawsuits and risks of being sued would be even higher. It would give people one more reason to feel righteous indignation and want to sue. One time an employee made a mistake (it happens to everyone eventually, they weren’t being a dumbass) with medication and a patient almost died. The patient eventually was okay, but the family of the patient held that med error over our employers’ heads for years, threatening to sue if they (the family) didn’t get their way with this or that in regards to the patient’s care. It was a major thorn in my employers’ side, to have this family constantly making demands and threats.
How much more difficult do you think it would have been for the employers if it had been discovered that the employee was high when they made the med error, and that the employer hadn’t even attempted to screen out drug users? It would be ever so much worse. Who wants that grief? Who wants to give families even more reasons to want to sue?
Employers want to protect themselves against such hassles, and they aren’t terribly concerned about your feelings in the matter. Plenty of people will comply with their request for drug testing and will understand why it is important.
I know I am eager to comply with people that aren’t concerned with my feelings!
And you aren’t concerned with their feelings—their desire to avoid even more annoying and troublesome lawsuits is apparently meaningless to you. This “not caring about your feelings” thing works both ways, you know.
So you think the company I work for is responsible for catching me doing whatever criminal activity I can come up with?
For me it would be a sudden, unannounced policy change - that is going from having no drug testing policy to having a policy where everyone gets tested once a week/month/year. That’s one concrete example.
I’m sure there would be other situations as well - but that’s the first that comes to mind.
I’m honest to Og amazed at some of the defenses read in this thread. What kind of vacuum do you folks think exists? Certainly, if Suzie Stoner sits in a cubicle and writes code, her ability to hurt me is minimal.
OTOH, history has taught us that impairment has horrific costs when stuff goes wrong. Captain Hazelwood wasn’t on the conn when Exxon Valdez ruptured at Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound, but the accident might not have happened had he not retired to his cabin with a buzz.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of everyone enjoying their right to ingest or partake of whatever substances they wish in the privacy of their home. That said, their rights to personal space and enjoyment stop when the public is encountered.
I sometimes drive firetrucks and get into HazMat suits. Should I be drug-free for your safety? You bet. If you fly planes, run trains, drive tank trucks, or do anything which supervises others, you should be clean. If you disagree, then kindly become self-employed and run a one-man shop, as you have no respect for your fellow man, putting your right to do as you wish above his or her intrinsic right to be safe from your impairment.
No. But they may well be tarnished and otherwise adversely affected, financially, if you are on the 6 o’clock news being busted for a crime. We can’t really say it’s none of their business what you do on you own time if can end up costing them money.
Additionally, while IANAL I do believe that it is an assumption in current tort law that a company is responsible for everything that an employee does on the job, unless proven otherwise. The implications of this can be pretty far reaching - if you’re arrested on the six o-clock news and are known as an employee of X company any lawsuits against X company suddenly become much more viable, because the quality of their workforce is perceived to have gone down.
It does cut both ways. Which makes me wonder… what secret info about the company’s finances/records/negotions are you privvy to when they enact a drug test?
OtakuLoki, that’s interesting. So a piecewise erosion is nothing you’d know when to stop?
I didn’t say that. You did ask for concrete examples, and I gave the first that came to mind.
Part of the problem with the idea of a piecewise erosion, now, is that random drug testing is an accepted practice in the workplace, now. Whether you or I like it or not. I’d consider leaving after the first time a company breaks their ‘This is the last change we’ll be enacting to the whiz quiz policy’ promise, but I won’t say, for certain that would be enough to get me to leave. At this point, erislover I think I’m going to challenge you to give me a specific piecewise erosion, and then I could tell you whether I’d knuckle down, or not. 