Quit Smoking and Lose Weight or You’re Fired
Thursday, January 27th, 2005CHICAGO (Reuters) - The owner of a Michigan company who forced his employees to either quit smoking or quit their jobs said on Wednesday he also wants to tell fat workers to lose weight or else.
The US is in a terrible state, folks. Our lives have become so reliant on our jobs that now our employers can dictate what we can and can’t do while we’re away from the job! Here we have an insurance claim handling company owner who, for obvious cost reasons, has given his employees one ultimatum already: quit smoking or quit your job. He has instituted manditory urine tests to check for tobacco use. Those who fail are out of the job.
This is just an outcropping from drug testing. Once people began allowing their employers to check for illicit drug use as a condition of employment, I knew this was only a step away. Now employees can be subject to testing for legal drug use. Employers are not doing this testing out of concern for either their employees or for the law, but out of concern for their bottom line. Years ago, it was shown that certain drug users were more likely to steal than non-users, so companies began testing for all illicit substances, not only those that were said to increase the chance of theft. Why? To save their bottom line. Now companies realize that they pay higher insurance premiums for those employees that smoke (if indeed they pay for employees’ health insurance at all), and are therefore subjecting smokers to testing.
A less docile population would revolt at this invasion of their bodily privacy. However, here in the US, we’re used to giving up personal rights slowly; we’ve been doing so since 1789.
To be fair, smokers do cost extra money to employers in the form of health care, and nonsmokers don’t usually have to take a cigarette break every half hour or so. To me, a logical solution to this problem would be to make smokers pay the difference in their insurance premium, and to subject all employees to the same break policy. But that would be fair. So instead we subject all eployees to testing.
And we just bend over and take it.
Now this same employer has set obese workers in his sights. Obese people now cost more to insure. “But if you’re obese, you’re (legally) protected,” the company owner lamented. To think that a group of people whose problem is mostly genetic should be legally protected should not be cause for lamenting. But to those who have to foot the bill, it apparently is. Soon the government will have to start offering grants and bonuses to those businesses who hire obese people, in the same way that they now offer grants and such to those businesses who employ the handicapped.
To be completely fair, since the obese are legally protected, this business owner is going about the problem in the right way. He offers gym membership vouchers, nutrition counseling, and health-related $100 bonuses. But if they were not legally protected, he probably would have gone about the obesity problem in a similar way to the smoking problem: he demanded that smokers pay a $50 monthly “assesment” fee before finally instituting manditory urine testing.
This is what we get for allowing big business to become so powerful in our government (and that’s not just a shot at the current administration, either; corporate power over government is not a new problem at all). The longer we allow this to go on, the more we will see our rights diminish.
