Light up, lose your job

FULL DISCLOSURE on future cigarette packs may require space for an additional warning: Smoking may cause unemployment.

The issue this time isn't what you do at the office; smoking has long since been banished to desperate speed-drags outside

the building. It's no smoking, \o7period\f7, even at home. Some companies now test for nicotine as they do for illegal substances.

Anita Epolito got the word in a company meeting that she would have to submit to a urine test for nicotine. "It was unbelievable, because I truly believed that what you did after 5 o'clock had nothing to do with your job," said Epolito, then a 15-year employee at Weyco Inc., a health benefits administrator in Okemos, Mich. "I took it as a privacy issue. 'You will not test me for something that is legal in my own home.' "

Epolito was fired for refusing to take the test. She took her case to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission but learned that in Michigan, as in 19 other states, her employer had the right to dismiss her for off-duty activity.

Weyco and Scotts Miracle-Gro, based in Marysville, Ohio, are in the vanguard of a growing effort by business to brake soaring medical costs by regulating such unhealthy employee behavior as smoking, even if it's done off-site. Privacy advocates and legal experts call it the opening round of a corporate takeover of personal lives, but company officials defend what they see as a reasonable business decision.

"We don't want to pay for the risk factors [smoking] creates for us down the road," said Weyco President Howard Weyers, who pioneered nicotine testing in 2005.

Smokers make an easy target. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tobacco users cost a company $3,391 each in lost productivity and medical bills annually, and run up a national healthcare tab of $75 billion a year.

Although only a few companies so far are firing smokers simply for smoking, a growing number are tacking extra charges onto smokers' health plans or keeping them off the insurance rolls. Alaska Airlines tests applicants for nicotine; Union Pacific stopped hiring smokers; tobacco users have to cover 100% of their healthcare bill at Crown Laboratories in Johnson City, Tenn.