Wow. I confess to being shocked at the moral outrage expressed in this thread.
The fear and paranoia amazes me. Corporations are not inherently evil. They generally do things for very pragmatic (though selfish) reasons. As astro points out, insurance costs are a very big reason to do pre-employment drug screening. Another is to avoid a “bad hire”. It is so difficult to terminate employees these days, any piece of info that an employer can use to screen out a potential problem employee will be gladly used.
I know, I know. Not everyone who smokes a joint over the weekend is going to be a problem employee. That’s not the point. The fact is that many problem employees are drug users. Those are the hires that companies are trying to avoid.
If you don’t like it, fine. But don’t accuse the company of nefarious purposes.
I can’t speak for all employers, but the process we use at our company is that the pre-employement screening is only done for non-regulated drugs. The company that we hire to do the testing does not report anything else to us. The candidate could be taking a wheelbarrow full of prescription or over-the-counter drugs and we’d never know it.
Basically drug tests are like cheating. If you have to rely on testing my bodily fluids to determine if I smoke a joint once and a while, you loose. No one likes a cheater.
I don’t think there’s a discrepancy, I think the response was unclear.
When you asked if he wouldn’t mind a company not hiring someone because they married someone of a different ethnicity, his response was meant to say of course he wouldn’t mind.
Normally I give old people a break, but yeah, I could support you on that kick, especially if I got to kick him after he went down (And that is a smile of glee thinking about the kick)
One gets a squeeze bottle that holds about two ounces and fills it with the donor urine. One then heats up some water on the stove a little bit before the test and dunks the bottle of urine in it to heat it back up. When it’s to the right temperature, one dries off the bottle and puts it inside one’s underwear to maintain the temperature. One then goes to the test, empties one’s pockets, goes into the bathroom, empties one’s bottle into the specimen cup and, very important, takes a real piss in the test toilet because they check that there’s urine there. One tucks the bottle back into one’s underwear, drops off the specimen cup, hopes one didn’t either overheat or underheat the urine (there’s an acceptable temperature range) and goes home to await the job offers that come rolling in to a drug-free worker such as oneself!
But if they’re testing for opiates to see if someone is a heroin user and there’s someone who had a tooth pulled and had been taking hydrocodone (very common for dental work) within the last couple of days, it’s going to show up as an opiate.
I’m not saying that every testing place follows the same policies, but I’m sure they are aware that there are legitimate reasons one would “fail” a drug test. I’ve only had one, and it was some years ago, but I remember filling out a form prior to giving my urine that asked me to list every single medication I took within the last X days/weeks/months (I don’t remember the time frame), over the counter and prescription.
I would assume if one said they had taken hydrocodone they would either make the person wait the requisite number of days for it to clear the system to test, or retest to see if they’d pass later.
You are completely full of shit. I don’t use drugs. I don’t like drugs. I would be completely cool in a world without any recreational drugs at all. That said, what companies are doing here IS evil. As has been stated, it assumes guilt for employees, forcing them to prove innocence. It monitors what employees do on their free time, which is not any damn business of a company.
I wonder how far the beat-down of human worth and dignity that making people pee in a cup involves would have to go to sicken a shit like you.
This ain’t fear. This ain’t paranoia. I’ll never flunk a drug test.
This is hatred, and it’s being levelled at YOU, punk.
I think he means that employers are free to run their business the way they want, and people are just as free to say that they don’t want to work for people they consider assholes. Both parties are free to refuse to employ/be employed by the other. If you don’t like drug tests, then walk. But don’t say that the employer has no right to require them.
I have to say that of all of the arguments for why it is ok for employers to do whatever the fuck they want, this one makes my blood boil the most. It completely ignores the unequal power dynamic involved, and implies that labor has far more power than it actually does.
Just because a company can do something and it is legal for them to do it does not make it moral.
Oh, there is a drug test that shows whether someone has a hard drug habit? I didn’t know that. Could you point it out to me?
Of course it is immoral for the insurance carrier to demand screening. The only categories are “positive” and “negative” in these drug tests. A drunk is at huge risk of accidents and medical claims, too, but they sure don’t test for alcohol. Someone who smokes cigarettes has a much higher likelihood of being out sick, but they don’t test for tobacco. If it is indeed the insurance companies forcing companies to do this, then they are making arbitrary distinctions, not basing them on actual data.
I have a hard time believing the insurance companies are the ones responsible, too, considering that only some businesses use drug tests. There are plenty that don’t. Federal employees in the USA are allowed to be tested, but they only test something like 200,000 people a year. So, if insurance requires it, why do they only test some people?
So you don’t want to work alongside alcoholics, either? Assuming the answer is yes, why don’t you try and convince your employer to test for alcohol, then? If you think that is outrageous because there is no test for alcoholism, remember that there is no drug test to determine whether someone has a serious drug problem, either.
The responsibility to keep drugs out of the workplace, while certainly reasonable, does not mean a company should extend that responsibility to outside the workplace. If you have a test to see if someone is under the influence at work, go ahead. If you want to test me for what I do on my own private time, fuck off.
And many problem employees are not drug users. Do you have a point in there somewhere?
Yeah, right, except…
So which is it, Algernon? Do they know every prescription you take or do people get positive results for medicine that has been prescribed.
The bottom line for everyone is whether or not someone can do their job and how well one does it. Whether someone does drugs on their own time has little or no significance in trying to determine whether someone can do a job. Testing someone who has been doing a good job for years is not only an unnecessary intrusion, but one of the most idiotic things I’ve ever heard. Why would risk having to fire a satisfactory or above average employee that gets the job done?
I was asked to sign a form consenting to drug testing when I was in retail and was promoted from part time to management, though I wasn’t actually asked to take a test. I declined to sign and told them why. They didn’t fire me or reprimand me. In fact, they didn’t do anything at all except aside from someone who turned out to be one of their best managers in the district but refused to consent to drug tests. That was back when the economy was good, so who knows if it would work now, but food for thought. (I also would have passed a test since I had not indulged in my drug of choice for more than a year.)
Do what you gotta do, but if it were me, I’d stick to my principles. I made the same vow years ago.
I made that vow after a summer employer required me to take a drug test. I took it in June and here’s what happened…
The first cup of pee was spilled by a manager (eww…) and never made it to the lab. I called a week after I had taken the drug test, concerned that something had been fouled up. At that point, I had never taken an illegal drug in my life, so I would have been surprised if the test came back positive. I had to show up the following week for another test.
The second test never made it to the lab. No one knows what happened to the cup o’ pee. I had to show up again to take another test.
The third time was the charm. It took a week and a half for the third test to be processed, but I was hired. Now it was July, and I had missed out on more than a month’s worth of work because someone needed to verify that I wasn’t smoking any funny stuff.
This, among other things, led me to promise myself that I’d never go through this again. Not only did the drug testing put me out of work for over a month, but friends who worked there knew that there was something weird about my drug test and were more than suspicious about what I was doing in my spare time. (To be fair, my employer never said anything to them about drug testing holding up my employment, but my parents did want to know why I wasn’t working and it was a bit awkward having to explain myself.)
In short, I don’t believe that drug testing is something that employers should do. I know there are insurance considerations and such, but in weighing that against the loss of privacy, the fact that not passing the drug test put me out of work, and the potential damage to my reputation, I’ve come to believe that the latter concerns outweigh the former.
Sorry. Didn’t mean to make it personal. The way I should’ve phrased it was that just because there are people who don’t like pre-employment drug testing, doesn’t mean that it is an immoral practice. I was just making a parallel (though opposing) thought to your “just because it’s legal doesn’t make it moral” statement.
Which, by the way, I agree with. At one time in our country’s history, forced segregation was legal. That certainly did not make it a moral practice.
You ask if I think pre-employment drug screening is moral or not. Well, if one assumes that morality is a black and white subject, then I guess the answer is yes because I don’t believe that it is immoral.
It’s simply a pragmatic response from companies as they attempt to reduce costs. Avoiding situations that might result in a) absenteeism, b) poor quality, c) litigation, d) employee turnover, is desirable from the company’s perspective. Is it unfortunate that drug screening is helpful in achieving these goals? Sure. But it’s not evil.
I personally don’t feel it’s an invasion of privacy at all. The information provided to us from the drug screening company is extremely limited.
However, I can understand where others may feel differently. Though the vehemence of some of the responses here have surprised me.
Well, I mean that I consider them to have equal rights — the employer has all rights with respect to his business, and the employee has all rights with respect to his consent. Either one can tell the other to fuck off for any reason whatsoever.
It’s a spiral only if you define coercion as any kind of force, which you know libertarian philosophy does not. It defines coercion as initial force. Defensive and responsive force are not coercive. Thus, if Mr. Smith initiates force against Mr. Jones, then the utopian government, acting on behalf of Mr. Jones, is using defensive or responsive force and therefore is not coercing.
Now, a really thick-headed person might protest that libertarianism has redefined the term, but of course he would have to ignore the fact that specialized disciplines like philosophy, science, law, and even typesetting routinely appropriate common terms and assign them specialized definitions. Physics, for example, sees force as mass times acceleration. It uses the term differently than does law. A regulation that carries the force of law does not carry the law’s mass times its acceleration. And in typesetting, readability and legibility mean distinctly different things, the former having to do with perception at the level of words and the latter with perception at the level of glyphs, despite that the terms are synonyms in ordinary usage.
If for whatever bizarre reason you will not allow libertarianism to use the term “coercion” in the manner that it is coherently defined, then feel free when you see the term to think “initial force or deception”.
(And that is a smile of glee thinking about the kick)