Commentary: Why smoking may be a sackable offence - even when working from home
LONDON: When historians look dorsum at the nature of work in the second one-half of 2021, they volition notice some odd developments.
A US president has ordered large companies to insist their staff become vaccinated against a virus or submit to weekly testing.
Wall Street banks have barred people from their US premises who have non had the vaccine.
Amazon has offered U.k. workers a £l (US$lxx) weekly bonus if they manage to plow upward to work on time.
Yet the move that surprised me most came in Nippon, where the Nomura brokerage house has but said staff will be banned from smoking on the chore, even when, as a Daily Mail headline put it, they are "working from HOME".
WHEN HOME AND WORK LINES Mistiness
I share the Mail's dismay. Smoking is a noxious habit, but information technology is also an addiction. For a boss to say people cannot fume inside their own homes, where they do lots of other unwise only legal things, crosses quite a threshold.
Other companies in Japan have taken assuming steps to stop their staff from smoking merely I did non imagine it would exist piece of cake, or legal, for a British company to prohibit it at home.
The mass move to working from home may have changed this. We cannot know for sure if such a ban is legal considering it has not yet been tested in court, says Jo Mackie, head of employment in London at the Slater and Gordon police force house.
"However I think it's going to exist possible," she told me last week.
Employers already had a legal duty to protect their workers' health and safety pre-pandemic.
That duty carried on despite COVID-19, which is why many British employers accept been checking to make certain staff at home have a decent chair and a laptop at eye level.
WHEN WORKPLACE LAWS Motility INTO HOMES
If widespread homeworking is hither to stay, which seems likely, Mackie thinks an employer could successfully argue that, since the law forbids smoking in a substantially enclosed infinite in a workplace, the room a person works in at home should exist smoke-free too.
"It volition make people unhappy," she says, merely it would not stop them going outside for a cigarette.
The big question is, to what extent does the law define a domicile office as a workplace and as Mackie says, "post-pandemic, that's much more of a blurred line than it used to be".
None of this should be a bother if you work at a place similar the Earth Health Organization. As far back as 2005 it announced it had a new hiring policy: Smokers need not employ.
The rule still stands, the UN bureau told me last week. Anyone applying online for a job there is asked if they fume or use tobacco products, and whether they would keep doing so if hired.
If the answer to both questions is "yep", the bidder is out. Anyone who lies about smoking and gets hired faces disciplinary action if they are ever found out.
What tin be done to curb the problem of 2nd-hand smoke from people who puff abroad on cigarettes next to an open window at home? CNA'south Heart of the Affair looks at only how bad the situation is:
More than FIRMS ARE NO LONGER HIRING SMOKERS
Ane can run across why a global health bureau would do as much as possible to postage stamp out tobacco, a leading cause of preventable decease that kills more than than 8 meg people worldwide each twelvemonth. But what most a moving visitor?
In the US terminal twelvemonth, the U-Booty moving and storage company became ane of the first major groups in its sector to declare it would no longer rent "nicotine users".
The business employs more than than 30,000 people in the United states and Canada, and said the new policy was part of an effort to promote a culture of wellness, "with the goal of helping our Team Members on their health journey".
The health journeys are only taking place in the 21 US states that allow such a hiring ban, and U-Haul is offer electric current staff help to quit.
But considering that smoking is an addiction that overwhelmingly afflicts the poor and disadvantaged, fifty-fifty some anti-smoking campaigners experience queasy about such measures.
"In the onetime days everyone smoked," says Deborah Arnott, primary executive of the United kingdom'southward Activeness on Smoking and Health charity.
That has changed, she adds, and blocking poorer or less educated people from work considering they fume "doesn't seem right or off-white".
Amend for bosses to assistance staff to quit, rather than not bad them or refuse to hire them. I concur.
Smoking is a scourge and the sooner it ends the better. But when it comes to stamping it out at work, employers should tread very carefully indeed.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/smoking-home-neighbour-fire-work-sackable-283161
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