"Where permitted by applicable state law, [company name] will not hire any candidate who uses tobacco or any nicotine product."
I don't know what to say except that minutes ago I was wavering in my decision to leave IT.
My company doesn’t forbid smoking, but smokers have to pay an extra fee each month as a smoker.
Of course the logical next question would be, “why just smoking?” Why not charge extra for being obese, excessive alcohol consumption, or any number of other lifestyle based factors which could increase medical costs? Not that I’d want to give them any ideas.
What I'm getting is that you don't like something and think it should be fine to discriminate against those individuals. If this is the paradigm we're going for, then let us also discriminate on politics, clothing choices, speech accents, etc. Why should we employ people who we don't agree with?
This is not a logical question because anybody w/ half a brain knows the answer: It’s just smoking because decades of legislation, media coverage, cultural change, demonization, ostracization, etc.
I assume there is a heavy penalty if they find out a person lied, but I don’t smoke, so I never paid much attention to it.
A person that puts one end of something in their mouth and while the other end is on fire.
For me it's like a pointer to all those "far worse things" I've seen and heard about during the last few decades, that popped up at the exact moment I decided to check out a particular opening.
https://www.quora.com/Can-an-employer-exclude-you-from-hire-...
"Thirty U.S. states have enacted “lifestyle discrimination” statutes that prohibit employers from refusing to hire tobacco smokers, as long as their smoking is limited to times when they are off duty and away from the workplace."
"The other twenty states permit employers to refuse to hire smokers."
If it upsets anyone, the issue is that health care is tied to employment in this country.
This policy is in other countries without employer health insurance. For example Rebel.com has that policy in Canada. Health insurance costs as the only reason is not true for every company doing this.
It's impractical to refuse to hire single people and illegal to refuse to hire people based on their age or health conditions. You can't even ask about age.
> Health insurance costs as the only reason is not true for every company doing this.
Smokers get sick more and miss more work[1].
40% of the US is overweight, so no company is going to have a policy that they won't hire overweight people.
Would you like to be managed by someone that doesn't understand people and has not lived through any major life milestone, but have the social maturity of a 16 years old high schooler?
Not necessarily the reason in OPs case, just saying there can be valid reasons to discriminate against smokers.
[1] We once had a visit from a former student of our faculty who went to the USA for his masters. He gave a lecture about his experiences and when asked what the biggest differences were he said, he was shocked to see people smoking in our university hallways. If it wasn't for that event I would have completely forgotten how prevalent smoking still was at the end of the 90s.
But seriously, name this company so they can be laughed at and shamed for idiotic discrimination practices. And so that one doesn't risk interviewing and working for silly people.