What next? Employers are apparently able to decide whether you can work or not depending upon your _perfectly legal_ home activities:
Tests for sex on unmarried employees? Riding a bicycle/bus/train/car? Having children? Not having children? Having sick relatives that need care from time to time? Too much internet usage? Too much TV? Overweight? Eat meat? Don't eat meat? Being circumsised? (or not, as usual)
All of the above can "affect your ability to work".
sheesh! And it's all legal, in I believe Michigan, and maybe 20 other states.
Our new Republican controlled state legislature got voted in promising to get government off our backs. The FIRST bill introduced into the new legislature (by a Republican) is a law that bans smoking anyplace in the state except your own home.
How many people die from the above every day, Nick, and how does it affect an employee's insurance costs?
That one, I can see. Sorry.
Yes, but only smoking and being overweight have statistically significant impact on your lifespan and healthcare costs. If the employee is kicking in health benefits, they're free to say what they'll allow, and you're free not to go work for them.
The flip side of freedom is responsibility. "Your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." People have the freedom to inhale all the carcinogens they like. They have the responsibility to not force their smoke on anyone at all who doesn't like it. Society must sometimes act collectively to constrain the behavior of the irresponsible.
Remember, "the gummint" is the collective will of the people. (Half of whom are below average. (Yes, that shot is a joke; the kurtosis of the mean is small.))
Just yesterday I was talking with someone who'd just renewed their driver's license here in Taxachusetts who said that there was a new question on the renewal form asking if they'd had a sex change operation since their last license issuance. (I haven't confirmed that story yet.)
I guess it makes sense to have their current gender correctly indicated on the license, but it made me wonder whether maybe they should add two more categories to cover cross dressers?
And that is why we have constrained automoblile manufacturers to produce only electric or H2 fueled vehicles and why every tree in every forest has a fence around it so that irresponsible children can't climb them and break limbs or even "DIE" falling out of them.
If you really think that "the gummit" is the collective will of the people then you must live on a different planet than I do. Mike in BC
It takes a while for sense to overcome nonsense. Sometimes nonsense wins. People have been messing themselves up for a long, long time. The Anasazi did it, the Hohokam did it, the folks at Ein Gafal (Gazal?) did it.
Your "counterexamples" are very weak. You'll note that hybrids are now on the road. Dubya himself proposed to move to a hydrogen fuel-cell system for autos.
Find a copy of the US Constitution and read it. If you _don't_ think the "gummint" represents the collective will of the people, you're not processing enough information. Or live in North Korea or Iran.
Pardon, but where exactly are you planning to get the electricity and H2 for these? All you're doing is displacing the pollution from the point of use, to somewhere that's not overpopulated. Sorry, but the people creating the smog can breathe it; don't push it out on me.
How so? Companies have all sorts of ways they can decide who to hire. Some require drug tests. Don't like it? Don't work there. Leaves that job opening for those of use who don't get bothered by that.
If you're laboring under the illusion that the "gummint" represents the collective will of anybody but corporate high-rollers, you're either blind, or living under a rock...
I'm grateful that I don't get anywhere near the amount of "gummint" I'm forced to pay for.
If a company needs "person X" to piss in a cup and send it to a lab to figure out if they're using drugs, then to me, that's prima facie (or however the legal beagles spell it) evidence that the employee's drug use (or lack of it) is a non-issue, and is none of the company's business.
Nice bit of nonsense PR. It would probably cost $3 worth of petrochemical energy (from a power plant) to produce enough hydrogen to replace one gallon of gasoline... which is about $1.74 here..... not a really great deal, to me. Not this it isn't a bad idea, but is about as useful a concept as ion drive at this point in time.
Frankly, the government does *not* represent the will of the people, nor is it meant to, since we don't live in a democracy.....
A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine. [Thomas Jefferson]
Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. [John Quincy Adams]
this is a representative democracy and the fact that most American Citizens are "not processing enough information" has effectively nullified the collective will and replaced it by a group of representatives with their own agenda. It will stay that way as long as the American voter doesn't compare his will against the voting record of his representative, but that might be just too much effort......
Are you getting the picture? They are all legal. Suppose an employer doesn't allow drinking coffee on the job and doesn't like coffee drinkers since he feels it detracts from their work. Ditto the aspirin. Have a headache on your *own* time. Pee in the cup and he finds caffeine or aspirin... go look for another job and leave that one to the people that don't engage in *that* sort of behavior.
Now, if you want to talk about illegal drugs or incapacitating legal drugs... that is different. An employer has a right to know if the employee is safe. I am in a drug consortium that I pay for out of my own pocket,and I understand that due to the nature of what I do it is reasonable. I work in an industry where it is commonplace and well, really, I guess, necessary.
Outside of the natural and normal concerns for safety, however, get me to pee in the cup so you can delve into my personal life and you are violating my civil rights.
I'll take that one step further, any employer that inquires into my personal life is going to have his head busted first. The employer exists only because there are others that are willing to work for him, we are not his to govern at any other time or way without him facing either physical or legal consequence.
Often overlooked, the people that are requiring this idiocy are nearly without exception, exempt from any scrutiny to their own lives. Can you say, "The asshole that wants to play God"?
Yes, well, not living in a two-party state as I do, it is, presently possible for a party to be elected to power with a majority of members in our Provincial Legislature by a minority of the voters. However if the electorate go for it in May this year we will be giving ourselves a new system called the Single Transferable Vote, which should morely equitably reflect the "will of the people" in its elected representatives. Why do feel that living in BC explains a lot? Mike in Northern BC
Basically that's how it is, right now. Employers have a pretty free run to demand whatever behavior (or the lack of it, as in this case) of their workers.
As one poster said, 'hey, if you don't like it, don't work there.'
Or better yet, bitch loud, long and shrill until this sort of bullshit gets changed.
The so-called "war on drugs" was lost long before it began. Somebody, or better yet, many somebodies, needs to slap the government upside the head with that fact repeatedly until the concept sinks in, rather than quietly rolling over and passing the astroglide the way you and Dave recommend.
Personally, I'd like to see the government handing out *ALL* of the currently illegal drugs, for free, to any comers. And I mean *ANY* comers. No restrictions on age, sex, religion, color, creed, yadda, yadda, yadda... *ANYBODY AND EVERYBODY* who walks up to the window and asks. With one catch: whatever the drug requested is, it's passed across the counter as a ten gram sack of as-close-to-100%-pure powder as it can be made.
It would be pure Darwin in action... Those too stupid/irresponsible to aquire the knowledge to properly use their drug of choice would promptly OD, leaving the world a much better place. Game over, bye-bye, no great loss.
Of course, this would most likely leave nothing but potheads and non-users drawing breath in fairly short order, but hey - not a problem at all, in my opinion. When's the last time you heard of a "desperate pot addict" mugging an old lady to feed his "addiction"? (Hint: The correct answer is "never", since despite the scare-tactics and hype, the stuff isn't addictive.) Gimme a dozen "jonesing" potheads over a single drunk, any time of any day of the week... At least a pothead (or at least, one who hasn't smoked too much and passed out in his easy-chair with a bag of fritos in his lap) can function as a reasonable facsimile of a sentient human being. The same can't be said for juicers...
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