It’s an interesting country that we live in. A country where whether or not you get your birth control pills depends upon the moral and/or religious convictions of the pharmacist behind the counter, instead of depending solely on whether or not the pharmacy stocks the pills.
We live in a country where it’s commonplace for potential employers to check out their applicants on MySpace or Facebook, and where it’s even more common for potential employees to be Googled. Then we have this: a Michigan company decided to do away with smokers last year. Not in the “I’m gonna kill you” sort of way, but in the “You can’t work here if you smoke” sort of way.
Weyco Inc., based in Okemos, Mich., is the health benefits firm that actually stopped hiring smokers in 2003 (a practice not that uncommon) and started firing current employees last year for the same reason.
Company officials enforce this no-smoking policy with nicotine testing for both the employee and the employee’s spouse. If the employee fails the tests, then he or she loses his or her job. If the employee’s spouse fails the tests, then the employee is fined $80 per month for being married to a smoker. It is at-will employment at its finest. (Check out the at-will statements provided by your next employer. They’re usually quite vague and give the employer a lot of leeway with regard to the reasons that they choose to fire people.)
It does make me wonder what is next. Weyco Inc. cites inflated health costs as the reason for targeting smokers for termination, and more or less it’s true that smokers put more of a burden on already overstretched health care programs. (The CDC estimates that $89 billion is spent annually on medical problems associated with smoking.) However, is that justification for firing people? Can we send people to the unemployment lines based on legal things that they do during their own leisure time?
Weyco’s policy certainly begs the question, “Aren’t overweight people more at risk for health-related problems?” Are company-sponsored monthly height and weight measurements the wave of the future? I can see the memo now, “Company picnic canceled due to recent change in policy. Join us for a weigh-in and mandatory 5k run on that day instead.”
Should companies hire and fire people based on their weight, even if it has no effect on job performance? Could companies even effectively implement such a policy? Even if the answer is no, it would still be interesting to see them try.
What are the limits of at-will employment? Not a whole lot, according to the laws of many states. No doubt, there are explicit and implicit contracts to deal with in the course of termination of employment, but, beyond that, at-will employment is exactly that: at-will.
By definition, either employee or employer can terminate employment at any time for any reason. How far can that go? The Michigan company has this statement on its Web site: “WEYCO, INC. is a non-smoking company that strongly supports its employees in living healthy lifestyles.”
Healthy lifestyles, eh? I wonder how long it will be before the company begins terminating employees for things such as street racing, binge drinking or promiscuous sex. I think everyone can agree that these three activities generally decrease a person’s overall healthiness. Indeed, it may be acceptable to most people to think that businesses could reprimand that type of behavior and terminate employees for engaging in it.
However, what if we take that a step further? What if companies began terminating employees for owning “dangerous” breeds of dogs due to higher incidence of attack? Or what if employment was contingent upon a monthly hearing impairment test to ensure that employees aren’t listening to their music too loud on the weekends? Scarier still: what if companies could fire you based on reports on your private life compiled by private investigators?
Call me an alarmist if you like, but that sounds like a pretty scary world to me. It sounds like a world where corporations own people instead of people owning corporations.
However, is that reality so far from the truth? If a company can already hire or fire you based on (legal) things that you do (like smoking cigarettes) outside of the workplace, then is it far-fetched to think this policy could be applied across the board? We like to think that the things that we do in our private lives are exactly that-private. At-will employment does not provide for that, though.
There are already laws on the books preventing people for discriminating on the basis of things like sex and skin color, but we need laws protecting the private affairs of our lives, too. And we need them fast. I graduate in December, and I would rather not submit my personal habits for corporate scrutiny.