Monday 26 September 2011

No Smokers.

The last place I worked as an employee started out with a smoking room. Then smoking in that room at specified times only. Then no smoking in the building.

Fair enough. Their property, their rules. This was all pre-ban when they still had a choice in the matter.

What they never did was to attempt to exert any control over what their employees did outside working hours. We could smoke ourselves into kippers or drink until we were grinning puddles and that was fine, as long as we turned up for work sober and alert.

In the USA, a company has decided it will not employ smokers. Not that it will not allow smoking on the premises, but that it will not employ anyone who smokes at all at any time.

It's a health care company. You would think that a health care company would know that the scare stories are all just a scam, but this one doesn't. It's a gullible health care company and therefore one best avoided. Whether you smoke or not. This lot have no idea what they're doing and if you do business with them, well caveat emptor.

It is their choice and I have no issue with that. I think all companies should employ whoever they want with no quotas or equality laws. If they don't want smokers or drinkers or fat people, their choice. If they don't want my 30 years of experience in gut infections, their choice. They won't get it now even if they change their stance but that was always their choice and they made it. There is, in this Italian-ancestry mind, no going back.

So what if a company only wants to employ white Aryan males? I say, let them. Let them pass over the Chinese expert in the field or the best Asian manager on the planet or the most efficient black administrator ever to be seen. Let them limit their potential if they want to. Let them lose.

Also, let them exclude smokers form employment and let them crow about it in public. As a smoker, I will never apply for a job there and nor will I pay them for any services they might offer. Just like the company employing only white Aryan males, they will get no business from those they exclude. They think it's just about who they employ but it's not. Not at all.

Set up a company that publically declares it wants only white blond blue-eyed men to apply for jobs. Then try to do business with a company run by a black woman and see how far you get. How about a company run by a Chinaman or one run by a Jew or one run by Pakistani Muslims? Nope. They don't want your business.

Exclude smokers from your employment pool and you exclude us from your customer pool.

Your choice.

4 comments:

John Pickworth said...

Saw this story on FoxNews the other night... they're right now broadcasting an hour long expose on Obama's Green Jobs con! Good channel. Bad President. Crap country.

As for the non-smoking Baylor Company... all I can say is you're going to end up with a lot of overweight stressed miserable folk working for you.

Leg-iron said...

They'll ban the overweight soon.

And the miserable.

That application pool is going to shrink, even faster than the customer pool.

Think they'll learn? I don't.

View from the Solent said...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/09/26/booze_fights_asthma/

It is to laugh.

Anonymous said...

The rationale for this discrimination is the fact that the company provides a healthcare package to employees, as part of their remuneration. And smokers cost more to insure. But families cost more than single people, yet discriminating on that criterion would be banned.
Therefore they should dispense with all anti-discrimination legislation. Let the market sort it out. My guess is, young women of childbearing age would be the first in the firing line.

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