Employers have recently tried every carrot they can think of -- including cash incentives and iPods -- to persuade employees to quit smoking. Now some are trying the stick.
Pointing to rising health costs and the oversized proportion of insurance claims attributed to smokers, some employers in California and around the country are refusing to hire applicants who smoke and, sometimes, firing employees who refuse to quit.
"Employers are realizing the majority of health costs are spent on a small minority of workers," says Bill Whitmer, chief executive of the Health Enhancement Research Organization, an employer and healthcare coalition in Birmingham, Ala.
Federal and state laws bar employers from turning down applicants or firing workers based on race, religion or gender. Some states have enacted laws offering similar protections for smokers. But experts say workers in nearly half the states, including California, have few legal options if employers decide to prohibit them from smoking outside the workplace.
Employees in many states "work at the discretion of their employers and can be terminated for almost any reason as long as it's not illegal," says Stephen Sugarman, a law professor at UC Berkeley.
Last fall, Union Pacific Corp., an Omaha-based transportation company, stopped hiring smokers in seven states. Company executives said the move was made to help quell employee health costs, which have jumped more than 10% each of the last three years. Weyco Inc., an employee benefits firm with 200 employees in Okemos, Mich., began random drug tests for nicotine on Jan. 1, saying it would fire workers who failed the test or refused to quit smoking. (Four Weyco employees resigned rather than take the test, says the company's president, Howard Weyers.) The Riverside County Sheriff's Department plans soon to require applicants for deputy sheriff positions to sign a no-smoking agreement.
In most cases, employers are asking workers to report their smoking habits voluntarily or adding disclaimers such as "nonsmokers only" to job postings. Others are requiring workers to take breathalyzer tests that can catch traces of carbon monoxide in their lungs or submit to urine tests to detect nicotine.
A sheriff's office in Florida is asking job applicants who have a recent history of smoking to pass a polygraph test proving they no longer smoke outside of work.
