The only reason I would ever have a drug test policy is so I could freely fire anyone I wanted without the hassle of documenting poor work or paying attention to what they are doing on the job. Which is what I think most businesses use the tests for. Test everybody, fire all the people I don’t like who ping a test for any reason (“Oops, sorry you got a false positive but my hands are tied”) and keep the high people I do like. Win for me. If an employee is doing a crappy job and I can’t get them for drugs, then maybe I’ll the hard work of documenting before I fire.
It would depend on the company and the work the employee is doing. If they are in a safety sensistive role with a probability of injuring someone (i.e. one of the guys on the floor of a drilling rig), then pre-employement, and then if suspected of using or if involved in an incident. Otherwise, office workers, etc., don’t need drug testing unless involved in an incident (for instance, a car accident during company business) where it is suspected they were under the influence.
Option five. I test them at every availeable opportunity, and if I fail to find traces of narcotics in their system, I fire them on the spot.
Only test if they have shown up messed up for work.
I’m not going to bother with testing. Show up for work under the influence, or acting goofy enough that I think you might be under the influence, and you’re fired. At will employment is neat that way.
If you were starting your own business per the hypo, would you start the same kind of business you currently work for? If most of the people here wouldn’t start a job requiring driving or operating heavy machinery, then your outrage is completely misplaced.
Because personally, I’d be starting a mmj dispensary and would be disappointed if my employees were all drug-free.
Oak, I’m not sure I’m understanding you. Do you care if the people you hire are using, if it doesn’t influence their work? That is, assuming the person in question is a secretary at your law practice fighting for the downtrodden*, would you can 'em if you somehow found out they smoked a doobie every morning before work, but absent that revelation you would never have been able to tell?
- Which is why you’re lucky this is an Eccentric Billionaire thread, not an Evil!Skald thread. Evil!Skald ain’t financing no do-gooding no matter how many times you saved his life. It’s a matter of principle.
Thank you for remembering this part of the hypo, and I am sending over some brownies.
Fudge brownies, of course. Marijuana brownies are for children and Welshmen.
If I was to make a startup, it would be in the IT development sector. Meaning that my employees wouldn’t be wearing suits or fronting for the customers to the public constantly, unlike say hotel clerks. Thus I wouldn’t give a damn about what people did in their spare time.
However, drug abusers frequently spiral out of control and I would like to retain a nuclear option in case someone is having a meltdown and I wanted to put the kibosh on it really quick. Let’s say the following phrase in the contract: “NeverWorks Inc. will not tolerate employees working in the prescribed work hours under the influence of alcohol or non-prescribed drugs. Management reserves the right to demand drug testing if a reasonable suspicion has been aroused. This process will be monitored for fairness by the office ombudsman. Being found in violation of this policy is a firing offence.”
I worked for a lawyer once who said he’d never hire anyone who could pass a drug test.
Other than the billionaire part, I have the OP situation. Around 15 employees. No drug testing ever.
No drug testing ever. If they can do the work well, then it doesn’t matter to me who they are outside of work.
:DNamaste. And shit.
I don’t care if they go home and do bong hits for hours every night as long as they remain sober and otherwise functional at work. Smoking up on their lunch hour is probably pushing it, though.
More or less this.
:dubious: So if someone is on some OTC cold med it is grounds for firing? You can get just as stoned on some cold meds as weed or alcohol.
which ones would those be?
Yay! Brownies. Need milk, now.
Don’t call me Shirley! 
Nyquil? And most cough suppressants?
I’ve been thinking about this thread throughout the day, and I find it interesting that the “land of the free” seems to be the only country where drug testing is required, whereas in other western democracies it’s looked upon as an infringement on basic rights.
My guess is that private health insurance is driving this.
It’s at odds with the personal freedoms expected in the US, but probably completely in line with the needs of for-profit health insurance requirements.
Am I right in this assumption?
No drug testing, what matters is if they can do their job honestly and well. If he does good I have no reason to care, and if someone constantly screws up or steals stuff, it’s not like I’d let him stay if he tested drug free.
America is only “the land of the free” in its own collective ego fantasies.
Partly, although it seems to me that you draw a rather more specific definition of “free” than many Americans would be comfortable with.
For a lot of Americans, freedom, in the sense we’re talking here, also encompasses the freedom to contract, and along with that goes the freedom of an employer to determine the conditions under which his employees work. This isn’t a slave society, and no-one is compelled to work for any particular individual or company. If an employer makes drug tests a condition of employment, you can either accept the offer of employment on the understanding that you will comply with the condition, or you are free to reject the offer and look for work elsewhere.
This argument, in which voluntary association is at the root of the idea of freedom, has a long tradition in America, rooted in Enlightenment thinking and the ideals of the Revolution. It was articulated quite clearly by a number of thinkers in the late 18th and the 19th centuries, and persists in the libertarian strand of American conservatism. Catherine Beecher gave it pretty clear voice in her Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), where she argued that subordination of wives to husbands within the family, and employee to employer in the workplace, was perfectly consistent with ideals of freedom and democracy because each person could choose whether or not to enter into those relationships. Beecher argued that:
These sorts of ideas aren’t absent in other countries, but they’re stronger in the US than in other English-speaking social democracies like Australia, Canada, and the UK. Obviously, even in the US, they are more persistent in areas of employment than in social arrangements like marriage, and Beecher’s ideas about female subordination in the household are clearly well outside the mainstream in the early 21st century.
It’s also a case of who’s making the demands. So, while plenty of Americans have no trouble with employers being allowed to demand drug tests of their employees, there has been, over the years, some very strong opposition to the idea of random breath testing as a strategy for reducing drunk driving. As you correctly note, the emphasis in some other western democracies leans the other way. In Australia, where i grew up, there is more opposition to employee drug testing, and yet random breath testing has been in place there for about 30 years and is widely supported by people across the political spectrum. The Enlightenment classical liberal tradition focused quite strongly on government as a source of potential tyranny, and this persists in America more than in some other places.
I think you’re right that the issue of public versus private health care is a factor here, but not in a purely instrumental or mechanistic way. The same types of ideas about freedom, based on absence of government intervention and the freedom of contract, are partly responsible both for the support for employee drug testing, and for the absence of a comprehensive public health system in the United States.
I’m not arguing, of course, that all Americans feel the same way about this. There are plenty who would be very happy to change things. But the intellectual tradition supporting this particular idea of freedom is stronger in America than in places like Canada or Australia.
… ?
If someone is taking enough cold medicine to get high, he or she is either sick enough to get a sick leave or they’re abusing a substance to get high while at work. In that case, he or she might as well be sniffing glue - the treatment would be the same.