Today: Smokers… In & Out Of The Workplace

Smoking used to be fashionable — so fashionable, in fact, cigarette holders and cigarette lighters were glamour personified. An engraved cigarette lighter or a Tiffany’s cigarette case spoke volumes about one’s breeding and sophistication. Now, the pendulum has swung, and fashion has placed cigarettes at the bottom of the food chain. Smoking equals loser.

Some states have banned smoking indoors, outdoors and on public transport vehicles. Custody battles even count smoking parents as a smoking gun. And workplaces are the one venue where smokers can run, but they can’t hide. Most people spend the majority of their life asleep — and at work. Hopefully not at the same time. Sleeping and smoking is not a popular combo — but working and smoking, like drinking coffee and smoking or even drinking alcohol and working (think Hemingway) is still a legal vice — although it’s probably best to save the Jack Daniels and work for fantasy unless you’re actually a blood relative of Hemingway…and even then…

Green is the new fashion, and smoking has no place in a green world. In fact, smoking has become like abortion, politics and the subject of women working or staying home to raise their children — a loaded subject with people either for or against, but rarely in the middle.

The legality of smoking in or around the workplace is a simple matter that lawyers can comment on. What’s more loaded is the question of the social acceptability of smoking at work. Not unlike tattoos in the workplace, smokers can be discriminated against because employers don’t want to send a smoker to a big meeting or deal, knowing that the smoking may be looked down on by the client and may be the straw that breaks the delicate camel’s back and loses the deal.

There’s no question that smoking is either legal or not legal. What is questionable is discrimination against smokers. If cigarettes are not illegal, should smokers have the right to smoke at work, just as women who nurse their babies have a right to pump milk at work?