When the potential consequences of the employees actions can hurt the company. I can’t remember who said it, so I don’t have a cite, sorry. But I’m pretty sure it was a doper who provided information on why pot hasn’t been made legal yet. And one of the primary reasons, if not THE primary reason was that there was no “pot blood level” test available yet.
That is, that there isn’t currently a way to tell how impaired an individual is from how much pot. Let alone all the variables that exist for determining “intoxication” like in alcohol. Such as, body weight, type of pot, etc.
Therefore, the substance does have the potential to still affect the employee while at work. And to answer your question, where do you draw the line? Well, you could just as easily ask the question from the other side. That is, do we just let go of all standards and let our world be a “whatever goes” world?
Let’s not let the pendulum swing too far the other way. If this is that important to pot smokers (and I used to be one, in Alaska when it was still legal), then they’d change the laws rather than try to force the status quo. That’s the way things are usually done.
As to the more damaging drugs? Like heroin and so on? I don’t know the answer to that one, not knowing enough about those drugs.
I stand by my opinion that a company has a right to what it requires of its employees within the law. If you’re going to try and prove that drug testing is against an employees “privacy” you’ll have to prove that that outweighs the people who own the company’s rights to have the workforce they want, if those rights aren’t protected, then we’re violating THEIR rights as well.
Really, when it comes right down to it, every blasted thing that we do, or that others do, violates someone’s rights to something. Should we just go back to unggg, unnnng, caveman days and have a free for all so that no one’s rights are violated?
Oh wait, that wouldn’t work, maurading tribes would be stealing other tribes’ women and goods, that would STILL be violating someone’s rights. Heck, that’s why they say 'that’s life" I guess. You lays down your money and you takes your chances.
If smoking pot is THAT all fired important, that you’re willing to violate an agreement with your company for “your” (collective you, not pointing the finger at anyone here) rights, then since you signed saying you would abide by them, you can’t, in all honesty say that your rights were violated anymore than the company whose rules you just broke. So it’s the pot smokers choice ultimately, have a good job, or stand by his “principles” and take his/her chances on getting caught breaking his word.
“Our top story tonight: Suzie Stoner, of Asscrack Township, was arrested in her home this afternoon for possession of what police describe as one ounce of marijuana. A police representative says she works as a shipping clerk for XYZ Co. It is unknown at this time whether XYZ Co. was aware of her drug use; the company does not perform random drug tests on its employees…”
I’m arguing from the assumption that a refusal to be tested results in termination. The previous poster you referred to specifically stated that his not being fired for refusing was contrary to the companies policies: they broke their own rule to retain a valuable employee. If a company wants to non-coercively test for drugs, best of luck to them. I don’t really see what the point would be, though.
Okay, they want to send your PC to a lab, instead. I don’t think this changes the question substantially.
Sorry, I thought I’d stated this earlier, but it looks like I forgot, or edited it out before posting: I’m not saying that all jobs, across the board, should be free from drug testing. If your job involves ensuring the safety of others, then I support testing. Cops, airline pilots, surgeons, etc. I don’t have a problem with testing. I don’t support it if you’re working check out at Wal-Mart, or driving a desk in an office building. If I have a job where I fuck up and it kills someone, then that concern trumps my right to privacy. If the worst thing that happens when I fuck up is that a report gets misfiled, then my privacy trumps the company’s right to test my pee.
Well, that’s more or less my point. How does doing drugs at home impair my ability to do, say, data entry the next day? I submit that there is no provable causative link between the two, and therefore, the company has no right to test for drugs if they can’t tell you’re on them just by looking at you. And if they can tell just by looking at you, you’ve probably already messed up enough stuff at work that they don’t need your drug use as a pretext for firing you.
Again, pretty much my point: testing for drugs is not at all cut and dried, it’s not cheap, and it’s not 100% accurate.
People stand for drug testing because the government has spent billions of dollars fostering a sense of paranoia about drug use on the public. Corporate testing is merely one part of the whole sick parcel of the War on Some Drugs. Yes, drug use can impair your ability to function at work. But it is not a certainty. What I’m arguing is that, rather than fire someone because they might, at some future point, become a bad employee, it is far more equitable to fire people when they become a bad employee. And if they never become a bad employee, they can keep their job until retirement, and still go home a do a mountain of blow every weekend.
But you must agree that there have to be some limits on how far a prospective employer can dig into your personal history, no? Sure, they can fire me because they think I might be a drug addict. But I don’t think they have the right to check up on me to find out if they’re right.
What the fuck is that supposed to mean?!?
I suppose I should clarify what I’ve been saying: obviously, the company has a right to test for drugs, and lay out that demand on hiring. My position is that they should not have that right. They can ask, if they want, but they should not be allowed to test.
Because they are accusing an employee of a crime, and treating him as if they had violated the law, without ever proving that either has happened. If I’m arrested for drug use, I have some assurance that the process of going from suspicion to proof (i.e. the trial) will have certain guarantees of fairness and impartiality as laid out in the Constitution and various federal, state, and local legislation. I have no such protections from my employer’s piss test. I have no real assurance that the tests will indeed be anonymous, or accurate, or fair.
All of which are directly, tangibly infringing on his ability to do his job. Again, the same is not necessarily true of drug use.
Again, my problem is that it’s okay for companies to do this at all. Spelling it out in the employment contract ahead of time isn’t an excuse.
I’m highly skeptical that health insurance costs are the primary motivator behind drug testing. If you’ve got a cite to the contrary, I’m all ears.
I’d say my right to privacy trumps someone else’s right to make a buck. Starting any sort of a business is a risky proposition: this is just one more of the risks.
You’re thinking of a principal called respondeat superior (I may have jumbled the spelling a bit) and it only applies to an employee who has committed either an intentional or negligent harm against another while in the course of his employment[ and while operating within the scope of his employment.
So, Joe Employee being arrested on the six o’clock news for drug possession at his home would not give rise to any tort actions against the company.
No, they’re not responsible for “catching you” meaning doing the police work, but neither are they obligated to keep you on as an employee when you do break the law and they find out. That’s what background checks are for, and most employers let you know they’ll be conducting one, and that you’re employment is contingent upon this.
They are within their rights to not allow someone who has broken the law to continue employment. As well they should be. If I owned a company and found d/l’d porn on my employee’s work computer, he’d be out the door faster than he could blink. Particularly if my company policy had spelled this out for him prior to his employment.
This is NOT to say that a person who has paid his debt to society should be ousted, but if a person is in the midst of illegal activity, certainly!!!
I guess you’ve never seen a co-worker on the news being arrested in a drug or prostiution sweep. I have. Within 2 days, all of customers knew about it. It CAN happen.
Well . . . there are a wider variety of possibilities of things that can be found on a computer. With pee, not so much. Probably why people (at least many people) would fight tooth and nail rather than submit their PC for “testing,” but would not get too paranoid about submitting their pee.
Well, we’re in agreement, then.
If you took notice of my first post in this thread, I also expressed my doubts about the need to drug test at WalMart. (Not that I share your level of outrage over the prospect.)
So why are we bickering?
Testing for “illegal” material on a PC would be far less cut and dried than drug testing, and far less than 100% accurate.
For instance, right now I’m listening to an MP3 from the late lamented Jerry Goldsmith (who just died :(). I own the CD, I have it somewhere, but who knows where. It’s not illegal to have ripped MP3s from CDs that you bought so I haven’t broken the law. But I can’t prove that I own the CD. So how would someone who was “inspecting” my PC tell whether or not the MP3 was “illegal”?
No, I think “testing” PCs for evidence of illegality would be far less cut-and-dried than drug tests ever dreamt of being.
Well, I don’t have a problem with this as long as it’s for non-risky jobs (WalMart) and as long as it is easy to fire them. (With some jobs where there is heavy union involvement—not that I am against unions, mind—it sometimes can be like pulling teeth to fire someone.) However, if it is difficult to fire someone, or if there is a high risk of increased insurance/litigation hassles, better to try to filter out the “bad risks” beforehand.
So, you’d rather they fire people for a suspicion, or have them test and possibly confirm that their suspicions were, after all, incorrect?
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Originally Posted by CanvasShoes
Good to know you’re not ALWAYS cranky
Exactly. You seem to be awfully snappish from time to time, when answering posts that were meant in mere debate, and not necessarily directed at you. It was a tease, hence the smiley.
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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.
Oh, okay, yeah, I see what you mean now. I still disagree. I think that they have a right to have drugfree employees if that’s what they want, and that they have a right to test to find out. Just as they’d perform a background check to make sure their potential employee wasn’t some embezzler trying for a job at a bank, or a sex offender trying to get a job at a nursery school or something.
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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’re not “accusing” anyone of anything. If an employee has drugs in their system, and they get fired, the only message then is “you failed to comply with company policy”. Same as if the employee broke the absentee policy or any other. If the company then calls the police and engages in some sort of citizens arrest type procedure, THEN I might agree, that’s not really their job, but if they’re firing an employee for failure to follow company policy? The employee has broken faith MUCH more than the employer imho.
The other issues you mention aren’t created by the company policy to random test, they are created by individuals who are not following the procedures set forth regarding drug testing and anonymity. I’ve taken hundreds of drug tests, along with lots of other weird tests required in my inustry for my health (like the lovely 24 hour pee jug test, where’ the grimacing barfy smiley?). I’ve never heard of anyone’s test being made “public” at least not in my state. Shoot, one guy got caught smoking a joint, RIGHT in the damn exhaust fan for a decon tent!!! He merely got fired and sent back home.
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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.
Well, I addressed this very good point in a previous post. No, we really don’t know how much pot “intoxicates” or how long it lasts and all that. But that is a problem, it could be a little, or depending upon the person, it could be a lot. When I was a sprout, pot was legal in Ak, and I was a serious lightweight. A few tokes would last me forever, and get me WAY more stoned that my friends. That, not drug tests was, along with just outgrowing it, was why I quit.
In a way, it’s way more unpredictable that alcohol. We currently have fairly reliable tests for alcohol intoxication, but we don’t have them for pot. So how do we know that someone’s weekend doobiefest won’t affect their job adversely come monday morn.
The company has a right to protect themselves and their company against this prolblem.
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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.
But you said earlier (and quite crankily too), that yes, a company does have a right to require its employees to be drug free. How else are they supposed to know for sure? And generally, at least in the companies where I’ve worked, they really don’t just do random testing for no reason, that crap is expensive!!! IME, what happens is that there are problems within the company (too many accidents etc) that have the appearance of being drug related, and then THAT is when they test.
A lot of the companies for whom I worked didn’t bother with the expense of testing office workers. But I support that also, if some stoner is taking twice as long to finish her work as the straight workers, why should the company have to put up with it?
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Originally Posted by CanvasShoes
I stand by my opinion that a company has a right to what it requires of its employees within the law. If you’re going to try and prove that drug testing is against an employees “privacy” you’ll have to prove that that outweighs the people who own the company’s rights to have the workforce they want, if those rights aren’t protected, then we’re violating THEIR rights as well.
One I have a legal right NOT to have to undertake. If I don’t want potentially stoner hungover employees, I don’t legally have to put up with them. I am legally able to hire and keep the workforce I want. This is true with everthing an employee might potentially do “wrong” from showing up late too much, to just being the wrong personality for you office, to being a potential risk from a pot hangover. As an employer (not that I’m an employer, I mean from their standpoint), I have a legal right NOT to risk this.
A person has a right to their privacy and their right to smoke pot, just not in MY company. And I have the right to make sure of that. They don’t have the right to do ole thing they want because “it’s their privacy” and then still work whereever they want. If they don’t want their privacy violated, don’t go where pot smokers aren’t welcome. Open their own company, or work at companies where this is not the policy. Or, they can’t have their cake and eat it too.
Good God there are a lot of people voicing support for this fucked up policy. If companies were really serious about diminishing the impact of drugs on job performance, they’d start firing people who show up to work hung over. That’s actually a significant problem.
Supporting the one doesn’t exclude supporting what you propose above. Which I do, most heartily. If I were an office manager, or a boss, they’d be gone before their mouths could follow their nasty day old boozy breath into the office.
I’m not 100% up on the ADA but my understanding is that drug addiction is a disability and therefore the employer may or may not be able to refuse to hire on that basis under federal law. Additionally, some states (my own included) forbid discrimination on the basis of criminal record unless the crime in question is related to sufficient degree to the employment sought (no drug convicts working in pharmacies, no sex offenders in daycare centers and the like).
Other than that, I am totally on your side in this argument and am in deep admiration of your passionate attacks on drug testing. I hate them and given the opportunity I cheat on them.
Are drug tests special, or do you feel the same way about other employment restrictions? For example, my employer has rules about second jobs- if I want a second job, I must get approval and can work no more than twenty hours per week at the second job. Professional athletes are often prohibited from engaging in certain activities by their contracts - not just illegal activities, but even playing in a pick-up basketball game. Should employers not be allowed to make those demands?
However, in many instances, alcoholism is considered a disability by the ADA, and so someone can’t automatically be fired for it.
Oh, and Miller? You’ll have to forgive me if my debating skills aren’t quite up to your standards at the moment. I’ve got the fact that my alcoholic mother - who, in recent weeks, has been told that her left lung is operating below capacity, has an enlarged heart, and needed three blood transfuisions in a 24-hour span - has apparently vanished off the face of the earth. Along with my three year old niece, who was with her. So I’ve had to do a fair amount of talking with cops, and worrying.
So bear with me if my arguements aren’t a well-articulated as they could/should be.
One more thing, Miller…from this site, the NCADI (National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information) offers up the following statistics regarding alcohol and drug users:
They are far less productive
Use three times as many sick days
Are more likely to injure themselves or someone else.
Are five times more likely to file worker’s compensation claims.
The study also found that 21 percent of employees said their own productivity had been affected because of a co-worker’s drinking
That seems to me to indicate that there may, in fact, be a link between what you do in the privacy of your own home, and your job performance, even if you (not singling you out, I mean “you” in a generic sense) don’t realize it.
I know you didn’t say that. That’s why I phrased it as a question.
I liked the motorcycle riding example my boss uses. Speaking of which, my boss also pokes fun at the company smokers quite a bit. Guess what he uses as justification of his concern? When should he be able to dismiss me? It is just not clear. A motorcycle accident will surely cost this company dearly, would it not? (Especially if he was on the way to a customer site…) Doesn’t my boss’s domain extend there?
Or only if the motorcycle rider is speeding? – because, whoops, he recently did get a ticket. Justifiable yet?
Seems I only ever debate you in the pit, CanvasShoes, what’s with that?
I cannot possibly conceive of any action that does not fall under this category in some way.
There is one standard I insist the company not let go. Do you remember what it was? I find it very important to mutually beneficial and non-coercive relationships.
I don’t need a law. I would just find another job. Isn’t that how I’m supposed to do things?
It is obviously against (by which I suppose you mean “invading”) someone’s privacy. I don’t even know how you could see it any other way. They are monitoring what you are doing in your unpaid, out of work, personal time: when is this not acting against an employee’s privacy?
And how, precisely, do I “prove” that the right to privacy outweighs the company’s right to have the workforce they want? Is there some new formalism that handles cases like this? The bottom line is that they hire me for my labor, and if they don’t like my labor they can fire me, but that is the end of our agreement. My personal time is mine, not theirs, whether they have an interest in it or not. I am not denying their interest in the matter; I am denying its relavence. It is not any of their business. They can stay out of my pants, out of my bathroom, out of my house, and out of my private life. They pay me for eight hours, they get me for eight hours. What is the problem with this? Is the world going to come crumbling down if companies are forced to negotiate with their employees’ private lives? “Gee, Jim, we really don’t think you should be smoking. We’re willing to pay you half the price of what you pay in cigarettes for a year if you’ll stop. That’s cheaper than sick leave and health insurance.” ; “Mr. Baker, this company pays you what we do because there are times, outside of the normal eight to nine hour day, that you will be on call and expected to come to work at a moment’s notice. While you are free to engage in most activities, we desire that you avoid anything that will directly affect your ability to work during those times. Do you understand that your salary includes this compensation?” Gee, scary world where people have to negotiate to get what they want.
What?
Signed agreement? Where do you work? At will employment is the rule everywhere I’ve been.
