U-Haul to Implement Nicotine-Free Hiring Policy | Hacker News Reader

U-Haul to Implement Nicotine-Free Hiring Policy

uhaul.com

155 pointssmacktoward341 comments

If we start allowing corporations to dictate what their employees do in their own time, where does it stop?

Safety issues are one thing (and should be a matter of legal regulation, not individual corporate policy) but performance issues are another, and I've already seen them conflated in this thread. Should my employer have the right to impose a curfew on me so that I'm not tired the next day at work? Should they have the right to attach a tracker to me to make sure I'm not cheating?

We are already flirting with corporate-employment-as-citizenship and crazy dystopian things have become status quo, e.g. beyond-the-pale noncompetes for leaf-level wage-slave class employees, and all "inventions"/IP developed by employees in their own time belonging to their employers regardless of relevance to their employer's business or support they received from their employer in developing them, and so on.

If an employee is performing poorly, fire them. That's where this should start, and where it should end. People are already selling their time to their employers, and they shouldn't have to sell their souls too.

> Should my employer have the right to impose a curfew on me so that I'm not tired the next day at work?

I bet the military has done that for centuries. Though I wouldn't want companies too start drafting people.

We already have drug testing in many industries, particularly shipping.

https://www.portseattle.org/sites/default/files/2018-03/Drug...

To see if you're illegally operating port machinery in a state likely to kill people is a different discussion than "did they have a smoke on their day off?"

Do they test for Ambien use?

The overuse of employee drug testing should be forbid too, unless there are specific good reasons for it.

In fact I think it's pretty revealing as to how poorly our society treats and thinks about people suffering from addictions that this discussion is only being had now that it hits people niccotine addiction, which is far less stigmanized than most other harmful drugs. Arguably, before, people didn't care, because it only hit the less-than-human "junkies".

What everyone's missing here is that drug tests are basically a joke for everything except THC (of which the metabolites are fat-soluble and take longer to excrete).

You can just not consume nicotine for a couple weeks and then go take your test. If you're using harder drugs like meth or heroin, you don't need to wait nearly as long. Using someone else's urine is also easy, but this is a crime in many states.

Is UHaul really going to hair + blood + urine test each employee not only before hiring, but randomly throughout employment? That gets expensive fast.

Ultimately the whole thing is silly. Show up, do your work well, and leave. Simple as that. (Yes, dangerous jobs like pilots and ambulance drivers should probably be randomly tested during work hours to ensure common-sense responsibility.)

Most nicotine users can't just "not consume nicotine for a couple of weeks" without physical side effects. Most of the ones who can, already have given it up.

This is sort of missing the point.

If my employer wants to make my employment contingent on not entertaining subversive thoughts, they'll have a heck of a time doing it today. Maybe they can e.g. devise some questionnaire or half-assed Voight-Kampff-style test that appeals to upper-middle-manager types with its high price tag and euphemistic-authoritarian marketing verbiage, but one has to imagine it would be fairly easy to fool.

So from a certain perspective, it's not really worth worrying about. But then, when they figure out how to really make it work, we're already living in a society where the theoretical concept of it is completely mainstream and acceptable, and at that point what will stop it from becoming the new status quo?

Found the smoker.

Joking aside, non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers. It is all fine and good if you want to do that to yourself, but you should also have to pay for it. Simply not hiring smokers is the right decision, they dont get tangled up in the details of sorting out what diseases stem from smoking and what are natural.

It's different paying for insurance to cover incidents or conditions that people can't control (accidents, genetic diseases), or would be bad for society to not cover (pregnancy, psychological issues).

One could argue that type 2 diabetes is something many inflict on themselves. Should people without this disease pay for their treatment?

What if the person with type 2 diabetes is a 15 year old kid, and their parents taught them bad eating habits which lead to type 2 diabetes? Should the parent's insurance cover that? Or should the parent not get hired because of something their dependent did to themselves?

No, but we should have a tax on sugar that offsets the cost of sugar-related illnesses like diabetes and obesity. Let people make their own decisions, but don't socialize the costs of substances we know are harmful like sugar and drugs.

This solution has many virtues. It discourages harmful behavior without being paternalistic. It comprehensively prevents an entire class of free-rider problems. It prevents people feeling like they're subsidizing another's bad behavior because everybody knows the smoker is paying their way.

And decades ago, people who ate "too much" saturated fat would have been penalized while people who replaced it with hydrogenated oils would have paid less while ultimately costing much more. All these years later, we now know that there was some pretty bad dietary advice/policy and the result could have been a whole lot worse if people were financially incentivized to change their diets.

This is a reasonable counterargument—though I'm not especially persuaded and it's a little bit of a straw man. Are you arguing that there's not enough evidence to substantiate an actionable belief that nicotine, alcohol & sugar correlate with significantly increased health costs? We already tax two of these on that premise—though not nearly the levels required to offset the costs they create.

Or maybe we should just disentangle health care from employment..

Best answer

And once we're all on mandatory government healthcare, how does that reduce the incentive for the government to dictate the exact same policies (vis a vis 'penalizing the smokers, the overweight, the gun-owners, the non-conforming') under the guise of "Well it's cheaper if we do it..."

Bonus, there's even MORE motive (of the 'means, motive, opportunity' triangle) for them to continue turning the surveillance state against ordinary folks to find out "who's actually smoking and lying about it to their doctor?"

ACLU called it back in 2006 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMCjnZyU1Lg

Smokers and the overweight vote.

Using my country as an example, any attempt to meddle with the universal healthcare system is treated with immediate and intense hostility by the voting public. The government floated the idea of introducing a $5 copay several years ago and it was met with almost unanimous contempt. The idea was promptly canned.

If voting changed anything, we wouldn't be allowed to do it.

I’m a non-smoking nicotine user. Should I also be included in the blanket ban by uhaul?

> non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers.

I don't want to pay for the insurance costs of alcoholics, diabetics and obese and sedentary people. Where do we draw the line? One of the problems with the US insurance mindset is this type of blame. Is it self-inflicted or not? Who gives a shit, honestly. It's a disease, that's why insurance exists.

The problem with this thinking is where do you stop? I don't want to pay insurance costs for motorcycle riders, overweight people, people who play contact sports for fun, etc.

Agreed, slippery slope indeed.

> non-smokers should not have to pay the insurance costs of smokers

The very idea of insurance becomes toxic when you start to pursue this idea. Everyone has some non-virtuous behavior we can identify in order to exclude them. Maybe your colon cancer is because you didn't eat enough fiber, so we're going to cut you off too.

All of this is why it makes no sense to have multiple "pools" for health insurance, because then it creates incentives for people like private insurance companies or employers to cherry-pick the healthiest people for their pool.

> The very idea of insurance becomes toxic when you start to pursue this idea

Not really. In general an insurance protects you against risks outside of your control and/or they penalise you for increased risk, and will refuse to pay for intentional losses. We all experience this with car and home insurances.

Smoking and its health consequences are a personal decision and there is an argument that you should not expect others to subsidise your life choices.

That being said, in many countries smokers are indeed made to pay because tobacco products are heavily taxed and proceeds are used to fund healthcare.

In fact, I believe that for example in the UK taxes on tobacco products bring in more money than smoking costs the health service.

It's commonly stated(Idk how true it is) that smokers cost the NHS less thank non-smokers because they die much more quickly.

As someone who took up smoking when I was young, stupid, and vulnerable, describing it as a personal decision doesn’t fit my reality. I quit eventually but it took 15 years of stop-start, combined with a constant, desperate sense of guilt and failure.

There are limits to free will. Depressed, anxious, abused and sick people are statistically more likely to make poor life choices. Let’s give them a break.

Agree with what you say though. I live in the uk and it did ease the guilt a little knowing that I was at least paying my way.

Tobacco companies, and really every major branded company product, rely on manipulating shoppers vulnerabilities to make money. Advertising has caused a lot of problems that we cannot address until we excise the source.

I'm fully supportive of banning all substance use from tv that is not made by a nonprofit for educational purposes, forcing all substances to use generic black and white labels that Are only differentiated by the brand name written in size 12 font on the back of the container with the warning labels in size 16+ font on the front. Likewise banning all advertisements, and the sale/distribution of branded products associated with companies that sell drugs.

Some vulnerable people will always make bad decisions, be it smoking, alcohol, drugs, or what not.

But the point remains that smoking is overwhelmingly a personal decision.

What costs more for health insurers?

A cigarette smoker that dies between 40-70 with what treatments for diabetes, bloodpressure, asthma, copd, and a heart attack before cigarettes kill them young?

A non smoker that lives to 105 but needs two hip replacements, cancer treatments, and assisted living between 60-80, then round the clock care for the next 25 years?

Obesity is far more widespread than smoking and costs everyone far more money. Should we cut off fat people from healthcare too?

Extrapolate that to diabetes, obesity, sports injuries, not exercising >3 times a week... and you start to see why that sort of orwellian control is problematic.

I think it gets hard to draw the line. Should we have to subsidize obese coworkers? Or ones who partake in extreme sports?

While we're at it, what about elderly people costing 100k+/yr in medical care?

Healthcare should not be tied to employment (see: corporate-employment-as-citizenship), and the general health of the population is (tautologically) a public health concern that needs to be addressed from the top, not the bottom.

Trying to "fix" people's addictive behaviors by denying them employment is like trying to cure the common cold by wrapping the patient's head in duct tape so they can't sniffle and cough anymore. Poverty and stress are uncontroversially regarded as risk factors for addiction, and in America if you don't have a job and you aren't a multi-millionaire then poverty and stress are what you will get.

Oh, and no, I'm not a smoker. I do drink a lot, which is something that's arguably just as bad or worse than smoking and yet nobody seems to give a fuck about it. Why is that?

Alcohol is back en vogue thanks to craft breweries making night and weekend alcoholism a fun hobby.

The alcohol industry is also trying to modernize itself to compete against looming cannabis legalisation.

Please note that Uhaul is not banning smoking/smokers, they're banning nicotine, which is a stimulant similar to caffeine. The difference is that historically the most prevalent delivery mechanism for nicotine has been to smoke it, and therein lies the health concern. Some might say this is merely a theoretical difference, since portable vape cartridges also contain potentially harmful additives, but this is more of an economic problem - like cigarettes, it's cheaper to include, or fail to exclude, additives that are harmful to humans when vaporized and ingested. However, there's no technical reason a product couldn't come to market tomorrow that would offer a nicotine delivery mechanism free of side effects. But we'll never find out because for years nicotine has been lumped together with smoking as a terrible harmful thing, and that's simply not true.

That product exists. Tobacco free snus pouches.

statistically, smokers die early enough that their lifetime healthcare costs are lower than that of nonsmokers. I guess that doesn't really matter to a company that only pays for current employees' coverage, but it's an interesting fact.

I don't currently, but I smoked for about eight years. afaik, this significantly increases my chances of various respiratory problems. I don't mind having that accounted for in my premiums as long as you're willing to open up about your lifestyle and see how we can adjust your premiums. :)

> We are already flirting with corporate-employment-as-citizenship

We're done with flirting, we're already probably at second base as if you take a cold hard look at the corporate-employee relationship in America, we've basically reinvented a new form of feudalism.

If we’re going to saddle employers with paying for health insurance, it would seem odd to restrict them from trying to have healthier employees.

(Hint: I’m agreeing with you.)

You can deny employment if a prospective candidate is fat or for numerous other superficial reasons. I don’t see much of a fundamental difference.

> If we start allowing corporations to dictate what their employees do in their own time, where does it stop?

Especially with something that doesn't impair your cognition or ability to do your job, even when taken a brief moment before you start working.

> If we start allowing corporations to dictate what their employees do in their own time, where does it stop?

It stops or ends with the persecution of people who helped with the persecution of previous groups - because you don't need that kind of people in your company anymore.

Reminds me of Henry Ford:

> The $5-a-day rate was about half pay and half bonus. The bonus came with character requirements and was enforced by the Socialization Organization. This was a committee that would visit the employees' homes to ensure that they were doing things the "American way." They were supposed to avoid social ills such as gambling and drinking. They were to learn English, and many (primarily the recent immigrants) had to attend classes to become "Americanized." Women were not eligible for the bonus unless they were single and supporting the family. Also, men were not eligible if their wives worked outside the home.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

And the Pullman company famous for its luxury railroad cars, whose paternalistic policies in the “model town” established outside Chicago to house its workers led directly to one of the great industrial crises in American history, the Pullman strike of 1894: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

From the Wikipedia article you reference: "When his company laid off workers and lowered wages, it did not reduce rents, and the workers called for a strike."

Was it the paternalistic policies or economic factors that caused the strike?

Both. The economic conditions of 1894 were the precipitating cause. The paternalistic policies were a contributing cause.

Pullman, Illinois was the definition of a company town.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/business-july-dec01-lab...

The rent problem was the straw that broke the camel's back, but the paternalism was what inclined the workers to respond to it so forcefully. The workers in Pullman were already frustrated with the company, and then the rents-and-wages issue pushed the situation over the edge.

It's not that much different than insurance companies and a lot of employers paying people to go to the gym.

It's one thing if an employer kicks $250 my way for joining the wellness program. It's entirely different when half of my compensation or even my job itself depends on it.

It's already troublesome when the employer gets their hands on employees' health information. It's none of their business, and the 250 dollars are just pocket change. You have to give it to U-Haul: you know where you stand, if you smoke or vape you can't work there, and if you don't they won't spy on you beyond drug and nicotine testing.

I disagree; I think it IS their business. Healthier employees cost less to insure, and health insurance is a large cost of employing people.

If the American people don't like this, then they need to vote for health insurance to be totally separate from employment. But Americans won't do that, because that's "socialism". So we're getting exactly what we've voted for.

If employers are expected to subsidize your health insurance costs, they have every right to your health information.

I think you and the person you're replying to are in agreement; what they very likely meant by "health is none of an employer's business" is that the act of insuring people should not be part of an employer's business.

>the act of insuring people should not be part of an employer's business.

It shouldn't be (IMO), but it currently is, and there's no sign that's going to change soon. The American people have consistently voted to keep things the way they are, and resisted attempts at decoupling employment from health insurance. Therefore, since the American people have saddled employers with this responsibility, I feel the employers have every right to your health information.

By the same rationale, if taxpayers are expected to subsidize my health insurance costs, shouldn't they have access to my health information too?

Britain demonstrates how it's done: what is paid for from public funds is decided by an expert committee. It is no one's business what any individual is suffering from, and it doesn't matter, what counts is aggregate demand.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_for_Health_...

"I disagree; I think it IS their business. Healthier employees cost less to insure, and health insurance is a large cost of employing people."

Health information is private for very good reasons. Employers who don't understand medicine have no business gaining access to our medical records, making decisions, and potentially discriminating based on their ignorant assumptions about employee health statues and problems.

"If the American people don't like this, then they need to vote for health insurance to be totally separate from employment. But Americans won't do that, because that's "socialism". So we're getting exactly what we've voted for."

This "we" business is a very lazy argument. There are large numbers of people who have been against this system. "WE" are not getting what "we" voted for, without even considering that we haven't really had the opportunity to vote for it in the first place.

"If employers are expected to subsidize your health insurance costs, they have every right to your health information."

This subsidization is a pooled, monetary component of employee compensation. While population-based behaviors will impact the overall insurance cost, individaul behaviors aren't likely to. But since you're so bent on giving employers actionable information about worker lifestyle choices, perhaps you should focus on easy choices that impact ability to work like prescription drug use like Ambien, guys who stay up late to watch sports, or anyone who stays up late to watch late shows, drinking too much, eating too much, eating an unhealthy diet (which depends on who you ask of course) . . .

By the way: given that employer-mediated health insurance is part of the compensation package, if this mediation was no longer connected with employment, do you just assume that the employer keeps the money that was previously part of an employee's earnings? Or do employees get the compensation that was bargained for? Or is it sent to the government for the provision of universal healthcare? Either way, the employer is paying a wage for services rendered.

>This "we" business is a very lazy argument. There are large numbers of people who have been against this system.

It's not lazy at all; it's absolutely true. Those "large numbers" haven't been enough to change anything. If the American people really wanted this situation fixed, it would be, but they don't, so it isn't.

>"WE" are not getting what "we" voted for, without even considering that we haven't really had the opportunity to vote for it in the first place."

Bullshit. Health insurance has been a major campaign platform for some time now. Have you forgotten Obamacare and what a big issue that was? And ever since then, the GOP has been campaigning on the idea of rescinding it, while the Democrats have campaigned on either keeping it intact or going to single-payer or some other scheme in between. The voters have absolutely had the opportunity to vote for it; that's what they've been doing for at least 15 years now.

> perhaps you should focus on easy choices that impact ability to work like prescription drug use like Ambien, guys who stay up late to watch sports, or anyone who stays up late to watch late shows, drinking too much, eating too much, eating an unhealthy diet (which depends on who you ask of course) . . .

That's all perfectly fine with me. Employers have all kinds of rights to police employee behavior and discriminate against them as long as it's not a "protected class". Why should employers be forced to pay higher insurance costs for unhealthy employees? And again, if you don't like it, there's the voting booth, but most Americans don't want to change this so good luck with that.

The definition of working hours are the hours when the employer can tell you what to do. If they want to say you can't smoke at night then it's no longer free time and they should be paying overtime.

Exactly. They could just as well say no rock climbing or mountain biking on personal time for the same reason (presumably health insurance cost is what's behind this move) though obviously that would be harder to enforce. Companies having a financial incentive to care about what you do when you're not on the clock is just another reason that we shouldn't have coupled healthcare to employment.

Not granting smoking breaks or prohibiting employees from smelling like smoke is one thing but disallowing it entirely is too much intrusion into employee's lives.

You're proposing new labor laws with this idea.

Thats good! However, you shouldn't confuse what makes intuitive sense with the laws governing your country.

You're also confusing something: that plenty of legal things are not socially tolerated.

If a company came out saying 'sorry, we don't hire feminists'... they might... face consequences. Even if that is legal.

Right now U Haul is going after an easy target, since most people hate smoking - but the idea that just because it's legal it won't have any consequences is silly.

Companies can be boycotted, they could get grilled in congressional hearings, new laws can be passed, and because of incendiary behavior they can get scrutiny for the non-incendiary behavior (see Shkreli) and other negatives can happen.

The law is supposed to codify what makes sense, and when it doesn't, it many times will soon. Many times that includes nailing someone to the wall to set an example.

I hope enough people call their lawmakers to pressure the system into dragging the U Haul executives who made this decision through the coals. This 1984 style 'we are going to see everything you do' is getting out of hand.

You and OP are both right. Smoking is bad, but labor laws should protect your job from arbitrary dismissal for legal activities outside of work.

Maybe, but the problem is that smokers cost the company a lot more than non-smokers, due to this country's strange expectation that your employer should subsidize your health insurance.

If we didn't have this idea that your ability to afford health insurance should be tied to full-time employment, then this shouldn't be an issue. But I can see that companies have a very good argument for discriminating against people who willingly choose to harm their bodies and incur higher healthcare costs. If we as a society don't want companies forcing their will on employees for things they do off-hours, then maybe we as a society should change the way healthcare insurance is handled.

I agree with healthcare insurance being changed.

I will say, just because it costs them more money doesn't mean they should legally be able to act on that.

Many times someone from a certain religion might cost an employer more than someone who doesn't need religious prayer breaks. But legally employers can't act on that.

I'm not saying smoking = religion, but I am saying information available to make logical decisions != the ability to act on that information. Just saying we've already made the decision that we will legally restrict companies from acting on certain pieces of information and therefore we can expand this existing framework to protect other life choices (eating fatty foods, skiing hobby, driving a sports car, having kids, etc)

>Many times someone from a certain religion might cost an employer more than someone who doesn't need religious prayer breaks. But legally employers can't act on that.

They can't act on that, specifically because we have a law that prevents them from doing so. Religion is a "protected class" in employment, along with a few other things (race, gender, etc.).

Smoking is not a protected class, so employers are free to discriminate all they want. Do you really want to spend your time writing to Congress to have them pass a law making smoking a protected class?

>having kids, etc)

I'm not sure, but I think having kids is already a protected class. If it isn't, it probably wouldn't be that hard to get that law passed. Getting it passed for smokers would not be so easy. Personally, if Democrats took this up as a major campaign issue, instead of focusing on more important things, I probably wouldn't vote for them any more.

So neoliberal causes like LGBT issues and immigration really are a bigger issue to you than worker’s rights?

Democrats are, in my view, the worst party in terms of focus and connection with the average voter right now. Wages have been stagnant for 3 decades for everyone, and somehow this is completely lost on the party. Instead they are trying to get Trump re-elected by focusing on gun control as a wedge issue. Focusing on worker’s rights or really any liberal cause besides protecting classes would make me much more likely to vote democrat. Not that I don’t think that everything is fine on those fronts, only that I think women’s/LGBT/immigrant rights should take a back seat to things like wealth inequality, worker’s rights, and global environmental health.

Focusing on workers rights would endanger their corporate campaign donations, and they can't have that.

> Do you really want to spend your time writing to Congress to have them pass a law making smoking a protected class?

No, but I do like writing about restricting employers ability to discriminate employees based on their off-the clock personal hobbies and preferences.

Basically using your language, I hope that 'everyone is a protected class' when it comes to legal forms of entertainment and hobby.

>Maybe, but the problem is that smokers cost the company a lot more than non-smokers, due to this country's strange expectation that your employer should subsidize your health insurance.

This gets dangerously close to validating discriminatory hiring against any negative health markers. Do they start tracking your BMI next?

And what's wrong with discriminatory hiring against negative health markers? It's perfectly legal to discriminate in other ways: employers are absolutely allowed to fire employees who are incompetent, for example. They're allowed to administer tests to job candidates to see if they're competent to do the job. There's all kinds of other things they're allowed to discriminate based on (like "cultural fit"), as long as it doesn't look like they're discriminating based on a "protected class" (race, sex, religion, etc.). "Negative health markers" are not a protected class. So why shouldn't an employer be allowed to discriminate based on BMI?

>that smokers cost the company a lot more than non-smokers

Does it though? Smokers typically don't get ill affects until later in life / retirement, at which point companies don't pay insurance.

Sounds more like typical Puritanical BS. Maybe they're just trying to get some free brand promotion.

I’m not willing to find a source to back up this statement, but I’d be willing to wager that employees that don’t have nicotine in their system are, on average, healthier than their nicotine consuming coworkers. Pretty much every business is interested in lowering their healthcare costs.

Regardless, doesn’t seem like U-Haul should be able to tell you to not use a legal substance during your personal time.

> Pretty much every business is interested in lowering their healthcare costs.

My company does this by just charging people who smoke an additional couple dollars every paycheck for their healthcare.

Do they also charge people who drink, are overweight, don't exercise? Seems odd to only single out smoking.

Those things are bad for your health, obviously, but aren't as easy to charge for since they aren't binary. How would you decide if someone was 'overweight' or didn't exercise? You couldn't base it on weight, because some people have a lot of muscle. How many hours do you need to exercise? What counts as exercise? How intense does it have to be? Do you charge someone who is 100 pounds overweight the same as someone who is 200? Or 10?

Smoking is binary, so you can easily price for it.

Smoking is not binary either; there's a world of difference between a couple cigarettes a week while at the bar vs. a pack a day every day.

And there's a world of difference between not inhaling smoke vs only inhaling smoke when you're drinking.

Inhaling smoke isn't good for you.

How do you know that?

(Also, if true, that still makes smoking not a binary)

> Inhaling smoke isn't good for you.

Sure. Neither is being overweight, which is just as measurable as nicotine use. (Probably more measurable, since you can't easily lie about being overweight.)

Funnily enough, there isn't (that is, there is some, but not so much as you would thing). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2865193/

It's the reason I've personally ceased my "smoking when drinking" habit.

That study is for “4-7 cigarettes per day”. Still quite heavy.

There are (or were I haven't checked recently) various freebies to encourage exercise and stuff but no direct discounts or fees.

My company gives bonuses for exercising.

Usually in the form of a discount for non-smokers

I can't remember exactly how it's set up but they're effectively the same thing.

This is also true of young people, slim people, exercisers, teetotalers. With many of these attributes having a larger impact on health than nicotine itself.(sans smoking)

Then those employees can pay higher insurance premiums.

...they do. Do you think your insurance company asks you if you smoke because they want to bum one?

Employers also carry some of the burden. By making their pool healthier U-Haul gets a better deal.

That reminds me of the time Papa John said he wouldn't give his employees health insurance because it would cost an extra 14 cents a large pizza. Heaven forbid.

I believe the raised the prices but then cut the hours below threshold to provide health insurance.

Is this a common question and I'm just not remembering it? I can't recall one time in the last 10-15 years where I've had a company insurer ask if I'm a smoker. I just pick PPO/HDHP from a list of options. I did this a month ago and don't remember it at all.

While my Dr of course wants to know, my employment based health insurance plans in the US have never once asked if I was a smoker. They don't really ask anything, other than "which plan would you like?" - if you pay for it you get it.

Happy to be corrected by someone who knows more, but my understanding is the major deciding factor in the cost of a workplace plan is average age of the workforce at the company, basically little else. For companies I've worked for, the individual health of those who work there was not factored at all.

I'm willing to bet that if you tell the insurer "we don't hire smokers" you likely get a better price though.

My plan asks. It may vary by state and my employer is self-funded so they may have influence over the questionnaire.

I'm not sure this works out. I know that people who operate heavy machinery in some states are tested to make sure they never, even in their free time, ingest certain things. Even legal ones. In their case it's done (IIRC) because of the impact those things can have on decision making and it's a safety issue. These situations can even be required by insurance companies to have coverage for the machinery operation.

While the case is different it does show a precedent for dictating some lifestyle choices as a matter of employment.

Yeah if it impacts your ability to do your work more than a little that's a different thing.

Pilots cannot consume alcohol 8 hours prior to flying for example.

The survival of hundreds of people has more value than freedom of an individual in his free time. One should not be allowed to put other people at risk for fun/entertainment/whatever.

Profit for a business, on the other hand, must not have more value than freedom of an individual. Otherwise, taking this to the extreme, it means slavery. Max profit for no freedom.

I mostly agree, but U-Haul is also directly involved with transportation that can affect hundreds. But I strongly suspect they are just trying to lower their insurance premiums and costs of employees not at work/downtime due to health related illness

Corporate employers generally pay a big chunk of healthcare plans and the large size of the pool is helpful in keeping overall risk and cost lower. As long as people expect to get their health care from their employers then employers will have a say in lifestyle decisions of their employees.

That is not how health care was started as a job perk in the US, it was used as a tool to lure employees to work for your company. It's a benefit of working there, because they will get the best employees because they offer the best benefits. With unemployment so low in the US it will be interesting to see how this fairs. A company should not dictate (largely) how you get to live your life while not at work. It's a job, not a lifestyle.

> One should not be allowed to put other people at risk for fun/entertainment/whatever.

I assume you mean to assert that the cutoff for putting people at risk for fun is somewhere below pilots going on a bender before flying, but somewhere above getting in a car and driving to the movie theater?

Going on a bender, getting into a car and driving is also illegal.

Sure. But is there significant performance/safety impairment connected to nicotine use? I don't think so.

Semi-old pilot adage: "8 hours from the bottle to the throttle and 8 hours from the toke to the yoke." Personally, I am skeptical that this is enough time in all cases.

Two hours/drink is what I've been told it takes the body to process. Mind you I didn't fact check this, and it's highly variable.

While the case is different

That's an understatement. It's wildly different. Nicotine doesn't impair judgement. In fact the short term effects are positive (it can be calming or enhance alertness).

Well, I suppose we can all add U-Haul to the list of companies that make absurd decisions that damage their brand.

Not dinging anyone who works there, but if you work for a budget trucking company and can't have a cig after what, I am assuming, isn't a great job in the first place?

This is an interesting point in the argument for universal public healthcare. I doubt companies work care much if they weren’t responsible for paying part of employee healthcare premiums. This was kinda already the case with the pre existing conditions nonsense before the ACA, but as costs skyrocket and companies are forced to make intrusive lifestyle demands from employees I wonder if it will finally tip the scales.

Universal healthcare already polls very well though... so maybe this won’t be significant.

It would be significant if companies start realizing that they could offload some of their debt for “free” instead of using it as a bargaining chip in keeping employees.

I assume large employers have already done the math and decided keeping the status quo (locking in employees via health coverage) is a net positive (vs a nationalized system of some variety).

I don't think it has ever been presented as a possible option for anyone to seriously consider. Ultimately it would have to come down to the specific plan.

Slightly odd that they're conditioning this on nicotine and not tobacco or smoking. If someone quits smoking but relies on nicotine gum to get through occasional cravings, they would presumably still fall under the ban.

I think it's because there are health risks associated with most if not all forms of it. Some forms may have small health risks though. Really, they don't want to pay out the money for high health insurance anymore. I don't blame them, I guess. But it does seem discriminatory.

> there are health risks associated with most if not all forms of it

Hey, nicotine protects against Parkinson’s - perhaps they should reconsider their actuarial models!

(Fun fact: so does methylphenidate, which apparently is generally neuroprotective according the latest on PubMed)

>it's because there are health risks associated with most if not all forms of it. Some forms may have small health risks though.

There is a strong causal relationship between any nicotine consumption and a plethora of cardiovascular issues. While these effects might be small for the occasional user, they certainly have a detrimental impact on the health of habitual users.

> There is a strong causal relationship between any nicotine consumption and a plethora of cardiovascular issues.

You can test for nicotine usage very easily, but you can’t catch someone smoking anywhere near as easily.

It's pretty easy to test for Carbon Monoxide - can use a small handheld device that looks like a breathalyzer.

You still need to be physically present at the time of smoking though, rather than able to spot check weeks afterwards like you can with nicotine usage in general.

CO-related effects persist in smokers for some time after smoking (a few days for red blood cell weirdness to go away, IIRC). Not sure how easy to test it is, though.

Wouldn’t that also flag people who smoke other drugs such as marijuana?

Yeah, probably. Though I'd guess that anywhere that has a policy that bans smoking tobacco probably wouldn't be excited about marijuana either...

I understand the health implications of being a nicotine user but I’m totally against policies like this.

It’s your body, if you wish to smoke you should not face employment discrimination.

Yes, I agree. This move makes me much less likely to use U-Haul. I don't like supporting companies that abuse their employees.

Abuse? Second hand smoking is a thing, it's the smokers who are doing the abuse, both to themselves and others.

This isn't about smoking, this about nicotine supplementation.

Second hand smoking can be addressed by prohibiting smoking on company premises, which is totally fair game.

This is the company demanding to have a say in what their employees do on their own time, off of company property. That's abusive.

This isn't sufficient. Smoking's effects lingers on the smoker for quite a while after they smoke. So even if they leave the company premise and come back, there's still the effect of third hand smoking. This was studied and shown to enter the HVAC system and even affect rooms where the smoker isn't sitting in. It's quite the dangerous, selfish, and disgusting habit.

The case that secondhand smoke (outside of enclosed places where the smoke accumulates) is harmful to nonallergic others is weak at best. The case that thirdhand smoke is harmful is essentially unsupportable.

It's been shown in studies, such as https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/hvac-systems-spre...

That article does not provide any evidence that thirdhand smoke is a real health hazard.

This isn't a ban on smoking. It's a ban on nicotine. That includes gum and other forms of it. It's not just about cigarettes.

You know what else emits large amounts of toxic gases at U-haul? The rental trucks. Maybe they should eliminate ICE vehicles first. And then not hire anyone who owns one.

> Second hand smoking is a thing

Second-hand smoking is no more a thing than pink fairies are a thing. It's junk science used to justify a moral panic — at its root, the same impulse behind drug laws, anti-homosexual laws and racist laws.

Both the American Cancer Society and the Center for Disease Control disagree:

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/seco...

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/tobacco-and-canc...

I read the first link, and I don't like the presentation for two reasons - they define secondhand smoke as tobacco smoke, so by definition (e.g.) living in a house with a fireplace that's used all the time doesn't count. And grouping living with a smoker with all other incidental exposure does not seem legitimate to me. It's like saying because workers in a popcorn factory sometimes get a horrible lung disease from artificial butter, you are at significant risk because you eat it a few times a year.

So I'm not saying there's anything out and out false there, but it is what I think of as (more or less) "fake news". My conclusion is that yes, it is bad for parents to be smokers, but if we're not going to take all children away from them for being unfit, then how much less should we go on a holy war against smokers in general for their impact on strangers?

I'm old enough that I remember when nonsmoking sections in restaurants were right next to the smoking sections. It's nice to have it banned indoors, but that's the point at which we've gone far enough, and people who claimed there was a slippery slope turned out to be prophetic.

It seems logical to separate "wood-burning" smoke from tobacco smoke for research and policy purposes.

Your popcorn factory example doesn't apply here at all. They are not saying "smokers have health problems, therefore second-hand smokers have problems". They are directly tying second hand smoke to the health problems.

If you think this is "fake news", please refer to the reference section.

Strongly disagree. I am very allergic to smoke, cigarette smoke in particular. Its not just the smoker that's being affected. I've had numerous run ins with HR about second hand smoke on the job and how it affects my health. I wish my company had a policy like this.

This is a no nicotine policy, not a no smoking policy. It bans vaping, gum, patches, and lozenges. It bans employees from using them even if they are never used at work. The employee simply has to test positive for nicotine.

They've banned smoking on the job for years now.

This is now banning nicotine use off the job as well.

I have the same problem with perfume, cologne, and hairspray. Even more of a problem with automobile exhaust. I don't complain to HR though.

I dunno, I like it. Unlike other leisure-time activities being discussed here, smoking usually occurs during the workday and makes people stink for hours. It's on par with a severe personal hygiene issue, which I think is also a reasonable barrier to employment if it's affecting other employees. I would very seriously consider quitting my job if I had to smell cigarettes due to a coworker.

It’s a slippery slope, but it’s easy to think that way because it’s personally appealing to you.

What if the policy banned something else - chewing gum, perfume, or eating foods with strong odors? All of those things do bother me but I put up with it because it’s not just about me.

Those don't really seem comparable to me. Perfume, maybe, I guess, but I doubt Uhaul is having a problem with serial perfume wearing. "Slippery slope" is a really weak argument, anyway. Unlike food and perfume, cigarettes cause real health and social issues. I don't see a problem with trying to address those. If you don't like it, don't work there. I do like it, so I find this to be an incentive to work there.

> "Slippery slope" is a really weak argument, anyway.

The slippery slope is the only argument here. Testing for legal and somewhat socially tolerated substances is an encroachment of civil liberties.

> Those don't really seem comparable to me.

Neither would marijuana and tobacco smoking to someone in the 1950s.

> Testing for legal and somewhat socially tolerated substances is an encroachment of civil liberties.

I don't agree. The government isn't involved here at all, so no civil liberties are being encroached. On the contrary, requiring that companies hire people even if they smoke is an encroachment on the company owners' civil liberties. For something as clearly optional and harmful both to the smoker and their coworkers, I don't think being a smoker is worthy of having protected class status.

You are free to smoke; they are free to not hire you for smoking; and you are free to not work for them due to their policies. This seems like a fine situation to me.

>The government isn't involved here at all, so no civil liberties are being encroached.

The government is legally bound to respect your civil liberties.

Every other entity is just bound by their conscience and the consequences of their actions (we still live in a free-ish society after all). While what Uhaul is doing it not illegal it is still highly disagreeable from a civil liberties and employee rights standpoint.

Legal does not imply morally sound and vise versa.

Why do the company owners' civil liberties matter less than the employees'?

Being able to give someone else orders, in this case telling them they aren't allowed to smoke, isn't freedom. It's the opposite.

obesity causes real health issues too

While everyone else is here debating their biased you've isolated the key problem here.

Regardless of your thoughts on smoking, should a company be allowed to influence the personal lives of its workforce.

Companies testing for marijuana and other illicit drugs open the doors for this decades ago, now the intrusion is into legal substances. Where does the line end?

The slippery slope is already visible, be careful what you allow here, regardless of your thoughts on smoking.

According to the article, this is NOT smoking but nicotine itself.

As written/described in the article, this would cover nicotine patches and gum to which your criticisms do not apply.

I don't understand how this is legal.

How about banning sugars? Or prohibit alcoholic beverages again?

Because only certain discrimination - discrimination based on "protected class" - is illegal.

Banning people based on skin color? Illegal.

Banning people based on eye color? Likely legal in most states.

Note that the linked site mentions they only do it in some states, because it is illegal in the others.

Eye color correlates a lot with skin color so it would also be illegal, otherwise you can filter out almost all black people by only accepting blue eyed applicants.

You just basically answered "because it is not illegal".

Agreed... I absolutely hate cigarette smoke, but voted against the bans. Though I wouldn't have minded nearly as much if they tethered the bans to allow smoking only at places with a hard liquor license that forbade children.

In general, I tend to favor personal liberty and freedom. There's a very small jump from this to similar efforts in favor of prohibiting any number of things on personal time and property (ban on fat people, meat eaters, sugar, grain eaters, etc). I mean, what's next? Morality clauses for all employees?

> I absolutely hate cigarette smoke, but voted against the bans.

This is why such bans at adult-only leisure places need to be at the community level, instead of at state level. So your vote matters where it happens.

I was a smoker during the bans and happily voted for them. Airports and other huge event centers not having smoking areas is incredibly inconvenient but I didn't have any problem standing 25' from an entrance, going to a designated area or any of that. I've always thought it was disgusting and didn't want anyone to have to walk through my addiction.

Smoking is still legal in bars/clubs when I go back home and it's so disgusting when I get home that I want to trash my clothes.

But there's an easy way to effect your local bars/clubs ... talk to the owner, let them know you're voting with your wallet. It doesn't need to be a government position to limit personal liberty.

Bingo. I live in an area where adult-only leisure establishments can choose whether to allow smoking. About 80% don't allow it by conscious choice and everyone is happy.

I'm not sure how you're realistically expecting a single person to walk into some 3 story club in the middle of Tampas club district and ask for cigarettes to be banned when every other club allows them. I'd be laughed out of whatever weird fish-tank backed club-boss room they let me in.

I mean, maybe it's worth trying but it just seems astronomically impossible to me.

> Smoking is still legal in bars/clubs when I go back home and it's so disgusting when I get home that I want to trash my clothes.

Curious where this is that doesn't have many more non-smoking places? All places I see where it is still legal have more non-smoking bars/clubs than otherwise.

I'm specifically talking about Tampa. I haven't lived there in over a decade but went back in the last few years and completely forgot that you could smoke in bars there. It was so gross. And of course some drunk burnt me with their cigarette while walking through the packed bar.

Not sure the ratio of smoking/non-smoking. I was in Ybor the big club/bar area and I feel like everywhere was smoking. They even had cig machines in most if not all of the bars. It was constant smoke.

Yup, we have to find places that conform to what we want (e.g. loud music, sells liquor, etc). So long as we have a reasonable choice, we're good. I am willing to go out on a limb and bet that there are more bars in Tampa that disallow smoking than ones that allow it. We should avoid outright banning something in all adult leisure places we never attend, lest we've moved the goalposts from health to convenience.

Assuming you don't smoke tobacco, aren't the health effects of nicotine (at the levels 99% of people limit themselves to) basically nothing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine#Adverse_effects

It expressly does NOT cause cancer in humans. It means you get a bit less REM sleep. No one has shown it causes birth defects in humans.

Caffeine sounds much worse!

> Assuming you don't smoke tobacco, aren't the health effects of nicotine (at the levels 99% of people limit themselves to) basically nothing?

Nicotine itself is believed to be associated with higher risk of cardiovascular disease. (the "Cardiovascular system" section of the wikipedia page on Nicotine is quite lacking)

Isn't nicotine far more addictive than caffeine? Perhaps a direct comparison could show that nicotine is less harmful on paper, but the addictive nature seems like it could make nicotine more dangerous in practice.

> I understand the health implications of being a nicotine user but… if you wish to smoke…

Conflating nicotine use and smoking suggests you do NOT understand the health implications. Even though the 2 have historically been close to intertwined they're not the same thing. This mentality is understandable due to years of frightening PSAs but it's inaccurate and precisely why issues like this hiring policy arise.

Right, cause Nicotine is "only" a highly addictive, deadly poison.

Most 'Smoke-free' policies are superficial and often make the problems worse e.g. Smoke-free sites mean people smoke near entrances, causing more annoyance for non-smokers. I've noticed most building sites around London are smoke-free as they have a line of builders smoking on the pavement. Their smoke becomes unavoidable to anyone/ everyone walking past.

I absolutely detest smoking, especially when they're exposing others to their cancer. When my dad died [of lung cancer] we weren't on good terms as I wasn't sympathetic to him. It was no surprise he got lung cancer as he smoked like a chimney and had a chronic cough for over a decade. The reason I have zero sympathy is because they made my sister and I breathe that crap in as kids (my sister is also very anti-smoking).

However, I don't have a problem with vaping. It is many orders of magnitude safer than smoking yet it is tarred (excuse the pun) with the same brush. In The States along smoking kills 500,000 people per year. Lives would be saved if people were encouraged to vape (it's by far the lesser of two evils).

The media is even more anti-vaping. Like the scare stories about that mystery lung disease killing vapers. As I vape CBD myself (I have a condition that causes muscle spasms, vaping is by far the most effective way to reduce them) I followed the story very closely. It was apparent that it was THC vape products in/ around New York from the get-go, yet a totally different message was coming from the media. Even if they did attribute those deaths to vaping, 14 [in total] is better than the 1,400 per day from smoking!

Absolutely. I hate everything to do with smoking/vaping and drugs in general, but when it comes to policy, I go based on harm to others. Smoking has real harm to others, but vaping is pretty much harmless.

In isolation, this is fine but if this is a harbinger of things to come, it seems quite problematic. Tobacco use is extremely strongly correlated with schizophrenia and while this would be difficult to ascertain, likely schizotypy spectrum (most of whom would be undiagnosed) as well. This may not be an ADA violation per se, but it seems to have that type of effect.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia_and_tobacco_smok...

Edit: Wouldn't this potentially fall under disparate impact?

I guess you'll have to get a prescription for cigarettes then.

I sometimes wonder what a society would look like where everyone who is currently self-medicating for an illness using a recreational drug, was instead able to have easy access to a cheap prescribed drug for that illness with fewer side-effects. Would things like alcohol and tobacco even be popular any more?

In europe it is illegal to ask this kind of questions in an interview and you don't have to answer. Even if you lie they cannot fire you. If they do you can sue them.

https://www.diepresse.com/3805136/verbotene-fragen-im-vorste...

Do they let people smoke in the workplace?

Are they as concerned about people's health, or do they just want to get rid of people who waste time on smoking breaks?

> Are they as concerned about people's health

Only instrumentally.

> or do they just want to get rid of people who waste time on smoking breaks?

No, they want to get lower group health insurance premiums.

There's many stake holders who's ok is required to implement something like this at such a big company. I'm sure there's people who like it for the health saving, some people who like it for the time savings.

As someone else said, the health insurance is probably the most reliable dollar figure they can point to as a justification and big business decisions like this don't get made without being able to quantitatively justify them.

Does it matter? If you're hitting two birds with one stone so to speak what's the issue here?

Good luck to uhaul achieving hiring goals. I imagine that they have to disqualify a significant fraction for drug use, and now they want to add nicotine. Good luck with that. Maybe they really really just want to reduce the incentive to hiring.

There's an entire economic sector that struggles with finding good people because of the drug crisis. You don't encounter this problem in startup land, but talk to restaurants or places looking for general manpower that doesn't require a college degree. Finding talent who will pass drug tests is a struggle. Now adding a nicotine? Good luck.

We couldn't get universal healthcare fast enough. When you couple employment with healthcare, it is only logical that employment will start disqualifying people based on lifestyle choices. Start with nicotine today. Tomorrow add obesity and diabetes. Why both sides of isle seem to double-down, no triple down, on getting benefits from work is crazy to me. The left sees the policy as a way of extracting rents/dues from corporations. The right sees it as enforcing a 'working makes free' philosophy on the poor.

It's an insane move, there's no doubt here. The question is: how did they came to that point? What are they trying to achieve? Is it about their HR brand, or just a pipedream of some C-level executive or even someone from the ranks below? What was the mindset behind this decision? Lots of questions, no answers yet.

What might be the most interesting aspect of this is that...

company executives now (again?) think it's ok for them to dictate lifestyle choices on people that have nothing to do with how the business is executed as a matter of employment. And, it has nothing to do with religion.

It's pretty frustrating how Americans have such authoritarian and dictatorial workplaces. We need more workplace democracy. Employers shouldn't be allowed to dictate what you legally do in your non-working hours if it has no impact on work (contraceptive coverage, etc.). This is how we got to the point that Amazon workers are pissing themselves in warehouses while trying to meet asinine metrics. Sad that all these gains in productivity haven't been leverages in any way to help wage earners and have mostly just continued going to the top .01%.

I suspect they simply don’t want their sales associates to smell like smoke.

Having worked in an org where nearly everyone smoked, they usually were outside smoking and "Discussing problems and solutions" Every hour on the hour at least. Being at my desk getting work done, and then having to hear about how behind everyone else was or how swamped they are. Or "Mike your leaving?" "Yeah, My cases are all green" They scoff, but if you smoke two hours off the day, they easily did I kept track, you should stay late to complete your work in a timely manner.

cool story. What does this have to do with general nicotine consumption, the thing they're targeting? They're not banning smoking at the workplace, which is what you're talking about, they're targeting smoking in your own free time. Also, nicotine gum.

How is this not discriminatory?

It's certainly discriminatory. The question is if it's legal to discriminate in this way or if nicotine use is a protected class. That they're choosing to only implement this in some states may indicate that they're not totally confident.

I’m concerned it’s creating unnecessary hardships. Quitting smoking is hard. If you’ve lost a job and need a new job then stressing over U-Haul’s no-nicotine policy - or losing out on a job that you’re otherwise qualified for only because of your nicotine habit - then I imagine the added stress and disappointment - and hit to one’s ego - might drive someone to smoke more - or adopt other unhealthy habits like drinking.

Also, I’d be very surprised if significant numbers of people give up not just smoking, but all forms of nicotine, just to get a job at U-Haul. They’re probably missing out on great talent this way.

...now, if they instead would hire a smoker on the condition they complete a company-funded stop-smoking treatment course, then that’s different. I admit I haven’t read the article so I don’t know if that was mentioned.

Unless this veers into mental health or Native Americans with a legitimate religious use, yeah, no protected class here.

It may also indicate that they think this will reduce their labor pool too much in some states.

Smoking anything has no relation to protected class status.

The question is if they'd qualify as Disabled under the ADA as addictions can qualify as a disability.

It's quite ridiculous if that's the case. Someone getting him or herself willingly into an addiction (especially nicotine) should not constitute a "disability". Unless they're classified as mentally disabled since they couldn't judge right from wrong to begin with, in which case they have other issues to worry about.

So if I get drunk and drive into a tree and can't work anymore because my injuries were too severe, I should be able to get disability, but if I managed to get hooked on an addictive substance then I can't even be allowed to manage my addiction symptoms?

Only thing ridiculous here is your short-sightedness.

Perhaps, getting drunk is a deliberate decision in general. People should face the consequences of such (and we already see it).

Not all discrimination is illegal. Hiring people who don't know how to code for a software job is also discriminatory, but not illegal.

https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/smallbusiness/faq/who_is_prot...

>Applicants, employees and former employees are protected from employment discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age (40 or older), disability and genetic information (including family medical history).

"discriminating" is not in itself unlawful. There's a small list of things you can't discriminate for.

Unhealthy lifestyles like smoking or tabs instead of spaces isn't on that list.

Not sure how I feel about this. It does feel quite wrong. But it also has a practical, logical side to it. Ignore being human for a moment: smoking is proven to weaken physical ability. Why do I want to hitch my wagon to a team that's slowly crippling itself?

"Why do I want to hitch my wagon to a team that's slowly crippling itself?"

The answer is; you probably are unknowingly, and everything is just fine.

Not sure how I feel about this. It does feel quite wrong.

Agreed. You can get into pretty weird cases... hiring athletic employees is generally a positive for the company, unless they also mountain bike/ski/some other riskier sport. How far will an employer go to ensure the lowest possible insurance premiums?

Or, marital status (no federal protection)... married people generally have better mortality rates. Will employers start selecting against single/unmarried candidates?

In the US, I thought it was already either illegal or legally risky for an employer to ask a candidate about their marriage status.

State law dictates the legality. There is no federal protection. About half the states list marital status as a protected class.

Marital status is not a protected class under federal law, but almost all states have adopted it as such under state law.

I feel sorry for the field staff and local managers who have to recruit talent. Also for potential recruits that require nicotine doses (via non-smoking means) to control inflammation.

Interesting to see this in a tight labor market. I also wonder how much they'll save on health insurance.

>Interesting to see this in a tight labor market.

Most Americans still can't put $400 together for an emergency and wages haven't risen in decades, so even though the unemployment rate is better it's clear workers have zero leverage to negotiate for better working conditions or higher wages. We need labor unions badly in America. This would never happen in Western Europe. While America may be a democracy, most Americans live under the tyranny, for better or worse, of their employers.

The nicotine half life is 2 hours. Don't know how they plan to enforce this.

Some comments above claim nicotine can be tested weeks after consuming. I wish someone could clarify if this is possible.

Just like weed, and many other substances, you can find traces in hair weeks or months after exposure. So if you smoke semi-regularly you'd always test positive depending on the threshold.

But this is about a piss test, not hair test, so could this be done with urine too? Also don't human body produce nicotine naturally as a neurotransmitter (unlike THC etc), which means they need to use a range as a marker for "smoker" so there will be false positives, how do they deal with this?

And soon connected to your fitness tracker.

You're all missing the point. Some statistician worked out that nicotine use likely correlates to age and this gives them a way to fire old people.

Existing workers are grandfathered in, the new policy applies only to new hires.

For now.

This is still basically being used to discriminate against older applicants.

Bollocks. Vaping is incredibly popular, to the point where Juul was taken to task for marketing incredably hard at high schoolers.

It's a nicotine ban, not a smoking ban. That means vapes too, which means plenty of younger workers tossed into the mix as well.

Care to take a gander at U-Haul's turnover rate?

Yes, but just because it could be worse doesn't mean it's not bad.

It sounds like current employees are going to have to sign the new employee handbooks eventually, which'll include this.

Damn. That's a GREAT point and a concept I'll keep in mind from now on. Seems very similar to Nixon's drug war which was really a mechanism to continue legally discriminating against racial minorities.

However, I'm not sure it actually applies here given the surge of nicotine vaping in young people.

It doesn't work like that. If a hiring requirement is not "reasonably related" to duties performed on the job (I think we can agree nicotine use qualifies), and if the selection rate is then less than 80% of a group with the highest selection rate, then it's an Adverse Impact and is illegal.

https://www.hirevue.com/blog/what-is-adverse-impact-and-why-...

Shrug. As long as U-Haul doesn't get fined more than they save, it's a win.

Hope no-one was dumb enough to write that down anywhere

Is Juul not a thing anymore?

2020 already feels like a train-wreck. The next thing will be caffeine... after that will be non-hiring based on DNA predispositions.

It's a rather large leap to go from discriminating against people who consume a thing by choice to discriminating against their DNA that they have no control over.

IIRC there is a law specifically prohibiting DNA discrimination, so that law would have to be repealed first.

There's laws specifically prohibiting a lot of things. That doesn't stop those discriminations from happening.

But if you were say reference a paper, that indicates a genetic predisposition to addictive substances..

Caffeine seems like a stretch, but I wouldn't be surprised. We're becoming more aware of the health implications of insufficient sleep, and the socialization of medicine has governments taking on the financial burden of people being irresponsible with their health.

I thought you would mention the drone strikes on foreign high officials (not terrorists). It seems like a story that should be getting a lot more airtime.

they would do better to reward the non smokers.

Here's some other bright ideas along the same line. Don't hire:

People who don't eat pork

People who eat pork

People with feet over or under a certain size

People who drive cars older than fifteen years

People who take public transportation

People who eat vegetarian some days but not others

People who eat bread without yeast

People who don't drink sugary drinks or eat sugary stuff

People who love chicken and watermelon

People who fast for a month

People who abstain from meat for forty days

Vegetarians and vegans

...

You can take this in any direction you possibly want because our governments don't give a shit. You are free to die of starvation because no one will hire you due to discrimination and hate and the government doesn't care.

Good start. Hopefully more companies and work places follow with similar policies.

I refuse to work for a company that wants my pee.

In an interview some time back, the interviewer mentioned drug testing. I replied, "Do I get a bottle of the HR manager's urine in return?" They were a bit flustered. "How do I know my superiors aren't stoned?"

I let him twist a bit and then took my leave.

Absent real public safety or other liability concerns, control freaks like this can pound sand.

This. Pee for enjoyment, not for employment.

Smoking can easily be detected without a urine test. The disgusting smell lingers on the smoker after they smoke for example.

Read the article.

"In states where testing is allowed, applicants must consent to submit to nicotine screening in the future to be considered."

And you are aware that there are nicotine delivery methods that do not involve cigarettes?

I still don't see the issue. They want their employees to be drug free. Athletes already undergo drug testing for example.

You'll spot the issue in your word choice.

They want their employees to be drug free

I do not belong to my employer. Maybe you're comfortable ransoming your bodily fluids in order to labor for others, but I refuse to do humiliating things that model one-way power dynamics for a right to work.

And until you show me how getting stoned offers a competitive performance advantage to truck rental clerks, athletes are utterly irrelevant. More on-point comparisons include prisoners and children.

Agreed. I may at some point be so desperate for a job that I can't be picky, but for now you can show me the records for everyone between where I'll be in the org chart and the CEO, inclusive, taking & passing the same tests, or you can fuck off.

This is just an attack on people with mental illness

https://www.nami.org/learn-more/mental-health-public-policy/...

Is it absolutely proven that the causality isn’t the other way around, and that smoking doesn’t cause mental illness? Because that would be my assumption with a standout stat like that.

Dave Ramsey [in]famously fires people that cheat on their spouses. Opinions of his financial advice aside, his justification is nobody is making you cheat on your spouse and they are not a protected class. A lot of parallels here, health benefits are expensive for an employer to buy. Given these are recreational substances, it would be in everyone's best interest to avoid these hires.

I doubt this is legal. Can a company refuse to hire people who drink alcohol because they're statistically less healthy than those who never drink? It's already illegal to discriminate on the basis of other factors which influence health, such as age and pregnancy.

Age and pregnancy status are very specifically listed in law as being illegal to discriminate on (in the US). Anything else is fair game. Assuming you enjoy being able to eat, your life belongs to your employer.

Weirdly, age is only discrimination if they're over 40 in the US, while below that you can do as much "illegal discrimination" as you want, which is pretty messed up.

I dont know about you but I really enjoyed this policy as a 22 year old with 10 years experience vs a 30 year old bootcamper. "They have a family they need to support and you're more of a risk" I'm glad we have really innovative policies that allow businesses to grow like this.

>22 year old with 10 years experience

Hmmm.

Do you not believe someone can begin to gain coding experience at age 12?

Not in a way that's relevant for your employer 10 years later. It can be a nice anecdote to mention, but don't put it on your CV.

By the way, I started coding at the age of 13.

Maybe you're just not as good as OP. I started writing code at 10 and being properly employed (contract, office hours every day, etc etc) at 14. I'm 28.

The extra years of experience in Delphi, C#, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Python, Ruby (before Rails even :-) that I had before the age of 18 are certainly a significant part of why I'm ahead both in seniority and pay of many people who work side-by-side to me, or for me.

The unpaid screwing-around-with-computers I did from ~13 through college is very relevant for my employers. I'd be a way shittier developer if you took out especially the Linux admin and networking stuff I picked up then, most of which I would not have picked up at any of my employers since, nor in college—I'd have just been among the other developers without a clue why X is happening or Y is broken—though it's consistently been extremely useful.

For the record, I did paid screwing-around-with-computers from 15 on, but the unpaid stuff added at least as much value to me as an employee.

Ditto my abandoned humanities degree, which I also don't put on my résumé. More valuable to my work as a software developer than the CS degree I eventually got. I wouldn't present it that way for obvious reasons, but that doesn't change the reality of it.

My early experience (ages 13-19), which consists of a mix of projects in Game Maker, PHP and JavaScript is at least as important as my later professional experience.

It's not equivalent: when I got my first job at 19 I was incredibly naive, I'd barely used source control, and I had a bad case of NIH syndrome. BUT, it's given me a depth of experience that is rarely matched by my people in age group.

Actual professional experience is often quite routine, and time pressured. You don't get the same opportunity to experiment and learn things in depth that one has as a teenager. It might not be the most efficient way to learn, but it's certainly effective.

Do I sometimes feel a bit of a fraud putting "12 years of experience" on my CV? Yes. But I also know I can hold my own in a room of people who have 12 years of "real" professional experience, and that it was this early experience that enables me to do that. So it seems equally disingenuous to not put it on my CV.

Prohibiting employers from discriminating against workers under 40 would be not unlike prohibiting the NFL from refusing to employ fast 40-yard runners, or disallowing Hooters from refusing to hire buxom servers. If you'll please forgive the swell of double/triple negatives.

IANAL You find yourself in BFOQ (bona fide occupational qualification) territory here — sometimes stated as "blind people can't be bus drivers".

For an NFL player, running speed is clearly a BFOQ. For Hooters the case is more complicated (IIRC there is case law)

Yes, but--the gist of my post was that there is no utility (and maybe some negative utility) in trying to pass laws to prevent the NFL, or Hooters, or whoever, from hiring the people they really, really do prefer to hire, all other things equal.

Smokers and drinkers are (generally) not a protected class in US employment law whereas pregnant people and older people are [1]

Some states may have additional employment laws that protect smokers.

[1] https://www.eeoc.gov/employers/smallbusiness/faq/who_is_prot...

It isn’t an EEOC violation, but possibly an ADA one. Discriminating against nicotine addicts might be illegal.

Are you saying that nicotine addiction is or might be classified as a disability under the ADA?

He's saying its one Schizo lawsuit away from being a proxy for discrimination.

"We can't not hire black people but we forbid coconut oil hair product use among employees" How well do you think that would go over in a court?

> An individual with a disability is defined by the ADA as a person who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a person who has a history or record of such an impairment, or a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.

I’m not sure nicotine addiction fits the bill, what major life activities does it substantially inhibit?

https://www.ada.gov/cguide.htm#anchor62335

what major life activities does it substantially inhibit?

Apparently, holding a job.

Can you discriminate against heroin addicts in hiring?

Drinking can work as a proxy for belonging or not belonging to certain religions. There must be at least enough standing to challenge such a policy in court, if not win the case. Of course the correlation is not r=1, but it is high enough to question whether religion is being targeted by proxy.

Which reminds me that not consuming nicotine and caffeine could be a proxy for being Mormon. So those policies might find their way into courts as well.

Not many religions associated with nicotine, though.

Unless one were to count the Juul cult.

Voodoo and Native American religions use tobacco.

Native Americans would probably disagree

Not that familiar with the specifics of the law here so many someone more knowledgeable can shed some light. Can employers discriminate against non protected classes that are closely correlated with protected classes? For example hiring only non vegetarians, people that drink alcohol etc that correlates with certain religions.

Most likely the ‘legitimate non discriminatory reason’ rule would be applied. Meaning the employer or prospective employer needs only provide an ‘honestly held’ reason for the practice. Although, the Federal Circuit courts are split regarding whether such a reason needs to be objectively reasonable. So (and this is not legal advice) if an employer does not want to hire members from outside of a particular group who happen to be non-consumers of alcPhil for religious reasons, they could site health insurance premiums as a reason to bar all candidates who consumed alcohol, thereby having a sort of shadow ban on people not belonging to that particular group. I think (and again, this doesn’t constitute legal advice) that such a reason would hold up under either the honestly held or objectively reasonable standards in the event of a suit.

— Also, the presentation of evidence under the above standard would be done at summary judgement, before the discrimination issue even got near discovery or trial.

It’s legal in almost half the United States.

A company can refuse to hire (or even fire) employees for any reason it wishes, as long as the reason isn't one in the short list or protected classes.

What you eat, drink or smoke is not the basis for any protected class unless it's linked to a religious practice.

I suppose someone's going to start the Church of Marlboro soon...

As a tecchie over forty, I can report that age discrimination in the tech industry is hearty and robust.

No one gives a damn about the law. Many companies have job ads that barely conceal their bias. As long as the money keeps pouring in, no one will cook the goose that lays the golden eggs. This has been the case for the finance industry for decades.

It's a shame, but I am fortunate, in not needing to work again. Many of my peers are not so fortunate. Some of the younger folk are in for a nasty shock, when their hair starts to turn gray. I hope they are keeping their 401Ks maxed each year. They'll need them.

My employer has a $100 per month surcharge if you fail to pass a physical and another $75 per month surcharge if you fail to pass a nicotine screening. Their justification is that they self-fund insurance and they're trying to keep rates down.

>because they're statistically less healthy than those who never drink

Um, that claim is not even supported by the evidence. Several studies have found health benefits of moderate alcohol use over teetotalling. Heavy drinkers OTOH definitely fare worse than even the teetotallers.

Even a little tobacco stinks up the place and cigarette butts pollute. Vapes don't do this though.

Don't like the facts, so you downvote them. Typical.

I've sat in cube farms where others were vaping. I wouldn't say it "stunk up the place" but it was perceptible.

It’s like the bad wig effect: You only notice the vapes that do smell.

I was very surprised to find that a coworker was secretly vaping at his desk. He’d been doing it for weeks before I saw him take a puff. Nobody noticed any smell.

If the vape juice is unscented, the only aerosolized compound should be propylene glycol– the same substance used in fog machines.

Also the nicotine salt ones are much more discreet since they don't need as much vapor per puff.

Both should be prohibited. The sooner society agrees to this the better.

How dare adults do to their bodies what they want!

Like getting drunk and killing others, or smoking in public places and hurting everyone around them? Yea, they should do what they want.

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