Most adults who smoke began smoking for the same reason: the false perception that smoking is a socially acceptable, even preferred, behavior among adults.
But smoking is no longer considered appropriate social behavior for the majority of working adults. In fact, systematic hiring discrimination against smokers is becoming a major factor in the working world. And there are good reasons to expect this trend to continue.
First, the productivity of smokers is lower because of higher rates of absentee ism, premature disability and mortality, higher insurance premiums, excess maintenance and property damage, and on-the-job time lost to the smoking habit.
Second, and more important, smoking is a major irritant and health hazard to nonsmoking employees, unfavorably affecting morale and increasingly resulting in costly lawsuits against employers who permit unrestricted smoking at the workplace.
Recent employee surveys taken within major American companies and government agencies show that between 70 and 80 percent of employees do not want to work around colleagues who smoke. Even among employees who smoke, a majority indicate that they would prefer that smoking be either banned at work or confined to separate smoking areas.
In a survey that I conducted with a colleague in 1981 involving 223 management personnel who were directly responsible for hiring their subordinates, 53.4 percent indicated that they chose nonsmokers over smokers when faced with similarly qualified job seekers. When I asked the managers to assume that smokers were absent from work almost 50 percent more often and that nonsmokers who are exposed to smoke at the workplace suffer adverse health effects, the number of managers choosing the nonsmoker rose to 88.8 percent, leaving 23 who regarded the choice as a toss-up, one not responding, and one who preferred the smoker.
In other words, if we assume that the 24 managers in the toss-up or no-response categories would choose the nonsmoker half of the time, then the nonsmoking applicant has an almost 20-fold advantage over the smoker.
The smoker gap
What makes these figures so ominous for smokers is that the two factors we asked our managers to assume in the study--higher absenteeism and nonsmoker health impairment--are both supported by current research. They are not merely assumptions. And many employers are becoming aware of this.
A sizable gap between smoker and nonsmoker unemployment rates may be one recent result of this new mentality. Based on a demographic analysis contained in the 1979 surgeon general's report and on Department of Labor employment statistics issued for December 31, 1982, the projected unemployment rates among American smokers on that date was 17.3 percent for men and 14.2 percent for women, compared with projected unemployment rates for American nonsmokers of 7.7 percent for men and 8.7 percent for women. Combined, the unemployment rate for smokers was estimated to be 16.2 percent, twice the estimated 8.1 percent for nonsmokers.
Although it is not clear why this disparity in unemployment rates exists, the current trend toward giving hiring preference to nonsmokers will not improve an already gloomy employment picture for smokers.
The R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, fearful that the public might become aware of these difficulties, has lately promoted its Camel, Winston, and Vantage cigarettes with advertisements depicting smokers on the job. You can expect to see more of the same from other tobacco companies--ads showing smokers in three-piece suits conducting board meetings; smokers in hard hats on construction sites; smokers driving trucks; and smokers modeling the traditional uniforms of the gainfully employed: lab coats, nursing caps, and mechanics' coveralls.
Over the past few years I have visited and interviewed employers who enforce strict smoking bans at work and who, in some cases, have stopped hiring smokers. They are unanimously enthusiastic about the results of their smoke-free policies. I receive frequent inquiries from other employers who want to know more about the benefits and feasibility of smoke-free workplaces.
The implication of this growing interest in smoke-free work environments is obvious. Whatever social acceptability smoking still retains in the workplace is likely to wane rapidly over the next few years. Employers will not tolerate for long a behavior that is both adding to the cost of doing business and impairing employee morale and health.
Professional people are becoming especially sensitive to smoking because of the fear--a real one--that smoking will offend prospective and current clients. Two of the largest accounting firms in Seattle have recently banned smoking among their professional employees both in their own offices and in the presence of clients, wherever that might be. The reason cited for imposing the smoking bans was simply that smoking is no longer an appropriate behavior in the professional world.
When I was discussing some of my research on smoke-free companies with my attorney recently, he commented offhandedly that three years earlier his law firm had stopped hiring smokers--unofficially, but by a vote of the firm's partners. The vote to restrict all future hiring to nonsmokers was unanimous in spite of the fact that 3 of the firm's 11 partners were smokers.
Attitudes toward smokers
Adult smokers who became addicted to tobacco before smoking was determined to cause serious health damage are not sympathetic to young adults who begin smoking today. Whether they are being vain or truthful with themselves, most older smokers prefer to believe that they would not have begun smoking had they been aware of its disastrous side effects.
Those entering the work force for the first time should keep in mind that to a mature, responsible adult, smoker or nonsmoker, the spectacle of young people smoking looks stupid and immature--not sophisticated and grown-up. And logically, persons responsible for hiring subordinates are not looking for people who appear incapable of exercising good judgment in the face of convincing evidence--that is, people who make a public spectacle of their immaturity, insecurity, and ignorance by smoking in public.
If anyone still has doubts about the damage that smoking can wreak on employability and career potential, he need only pick up the Sunday issue of the nearest city newspaper. He can read carefully through the employment section and count the number of requests for "nonsmokers only." Three years ago such a restriction would have been almost unheard-of.
And for every employer who is bold enough to publicly restrict hiring to nonsmokers, there are nine others who privately select against smokers, afraid to announce their policy for fear that it might depart from equal-opportunity hiring statutes. (It does not, of course, since smoking is an achieved characteristic, much like education, work experience, job references, willingness to work shifts or obey work rules, and so on. And all employers discriminate, legally and ethically, on the basis of job-related, achieved characteristics.)
The smiling faces advertising cigarettes are summoning people to sacrifice both their health and their professional careers for the future of the tobacco industry.
They are not telling the public that smoking is no longer an appropriate social behavior among most adults and that systematic hiring preference for nonsmokers is now placing smokers at a decided disadvantage in the job market.
The ads do not mention that three fourths of the working population no longer want to spend each eight-hour workday in a smoky environment. Nor do they mention that cost-conscious business enterprises see measurable savings from creating smoke-free work places, or that most adult smokers wish they had never begun smoking and cannot understand why anyone--with the proof of smoking's destructive effects thoroughly established--would experiment with a behavior that can quickly become a difficult-to-break drug addiction.
In spite of efforts by tobacco companies to convey a connection between their products and the working world, the gloomy employment outlook for smokers relative to nonsmokers is likely to get worse rather than better. The bleak truth for smokers is that more and more of their potential employers and fellow employees simply don't want to be around smoke anymore, certainly not for eight hours of every workday. And the simplest remedy for that problem is to stop hiring smokers, an option that employers are finding easier and easier to choose.
One of my academic colleagues recently suggested, only half jokingly, that cigarette packages display a revised ad monition: "Warning: Smoking Is Surely Hazardous to Your Health--And Probably Dangerous to Your Career."
