and no one irl even has the decency to agree with me because it’s so fucking drilled into the culture that these fucking BuNsInNesSes have a Right to do this because it’s a bSUsniEss. like oh yeah they have an office building so they definitely get to analyze my piss because they say they want to. sick fucking freaks.
preaching to the choir a bit on lemmy (or i would hope so at least) but still
That’s an American thing.
This. In Canada, most drug testing is considered a violation of rights and freedoms because your employer should not have a say in how you live your life. There are exceptions for high risk jobs where an impaired worker could cause death by negligence.
Bingo. If my boss asked for my piss I’d go straight to HR. Americans put up with so much insane stuff when it comes to work.
Which is crazy when you think about all the people that migrate to the US for jobs/opportunity. Makes you wonder how bad it is in other places.
In some cases it is, yes, worse. But in many cases it’s just the press the Americans spew about themselves living in the “land of the free” while the jackboots march in unison ever closer.
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It specifically found the opposite in safety-sensitive positions.
I run a manufacturing business; you oversimplify.
Quite coincidentally my HR person came to me just an hour ago and told me that two people have complained of a coworker smoking on breaks and at lunch and being high on the job.
He drives a heavy forklift. Am I to ignore the situation? If I do I expose my employees to danger and my small business to lawsuits.
How are the employees that reported it supposed to react if I say “Whatever, that’s his business.”
To a large extent businesses have their hands tied by the rules and laws of society.
But what you are saying is probable cause. I think the OP complains about random testing without any justification.
In your example, even if you were not legally entitled to carry out a drug test, you could simply call the police and let them do the check.
Random tests could be fairer and avoid discrimination or prejudicial testing.
Random tests are used as discriminatory and prejudicial testing.
They are never actually random.
My union pays you $100 if you get hit with a random. They’re also the ones who issue them. Not my employer
This is kinda nice
That’s a very easily solvable problem
Unless your idea is to use a daily meeting where a d100 is rolled ro determines who is tested today in front of everyone you cannot really rule out any suspicion for bias.
You just came up with a single super simple way to do it. I’m sure there’s loads of other solutions that offer similar sort of randomness with more convenience.
And remember, we’re comparing this to people asking to be tested on a hunch. Do you not think these randomness measures are better for fighting bias and discrimination, or is the issue that you can’t have 100% always free of bias randomness?
Do you test your forklift drivers with breathalyzers too?
I guarantee you more of them are drinking before they go to work than getting high on break.
My business doesn’t test at all because I don’t care what my employees do when they’re not a work. I have no desire to get involved in their personal lives.
But just as with weed, If an employee told me that another employee was drinking on breaks and at lunch my hands are tied. I can’t ignore it.
You might hate this answer but I guarantee that man does better work when he’s high and that no danger of hurting anyone on the forklift.
That may be, but that absolutely will not fly if he does hurt someone.
Many of the drug tests don’t check for drugs currently in your system. Many of them are akin to checking your liver levels to see if you’ve had alcohol at all in the past week.
Also, what a massive straw man.
Sure…but it’s not on him. Realistically, there’s:
- The insurance company that has the restriction (required by law)
- Lawmakers that make the law putting anyone under the influence responsible for any accidents, and by extension the company for letting it happen (if they knew)
I wouldn’t necessarily blame this guy, but our elected officials. If anyone’s to blame, it’s mostly Republicans (and Democrats in the early 90s) for pushing these laws so hard.
Okay, see, now this is the sort of nuance that I think is good for the discussion!
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You’re being so naive. I can’t get involved in the personal lives of all of my employees, nor is it my place. I’m running a business, which from the sound of it you’ve never done. It takes a lot more effort than you seem to think. A lot.
Hell, in some ways it’s not even legal for me to ask about an employee’s personal life.
I treat my employees well. I have a chef on staff and they get a free lunch every day in a cafeteria. I pay competitively. I didn’t lose a single employee through the pandemic and have employees that have been with my company for 10-20 years. It’s a damn good place to work. Not every problem an employee has stems from a shit work environment.
Malignant task-master? Out of touch with reality? I know Leemy is anti-capitalism, but it may surprise you to learn that not every employer is rolling in profits and lighting cigars with 100 dollar bills. I work damn hard and have employees that have a higher take home pay than I do. Every day is a challenge.
An employer is not a therapist. No small business owner should have to play guidance counselor for their employees.
This was more common back in the days, but the issue is that it will result in societal inefficiencies like alcoholics not getting better. Best is nipping it before it gets a lot worse.
This is why in other countries there are a lot of responsibilities as an employer and they need to help with either private or public healthcare.
I’m going to guess that the “other countries” you mentioned also have functional and affordable health care systems?
Yes, my point was that it can be good for society to burden eachother too. Especially where we’re supposed to earn our daily living, look out for people
Give me a functional healthcare system and I’m down with assigning companies more responsibility.
In Sweden the responsibility comes first, the company are liable for the employee if they don’t take action and know about the substance abuse (for example). And I think the US at least had some laws prohibiting like that, but maybe I’m thinking of wrongful termination
They are neither the fucking police, and here you are drug testing people
I don’t drug test at my business, but if two of my long-term employees come to HR and flat-out tell me that another of their recently-hired coworkers is smoking at breaks and at lunch my hands are legally pretty tied.
I can’t ignore it.
Are there criminal charges following a drug test?
No.
Bad example.
If negative drug tests are a condition for employment, you’ve agreed to them as part of employment. Being let go because you broke a condition for employment is on you.
You are welcome to find jobs where there are no drug tests, or start your own company with that ethos in mind.
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I imagine for the pay.
I appreciate my employers policy - you get one free pass if you attend therapy following a positive drug test. A second positive and you’re out.
We do randomly get tested regularly.
They’re operating heavy machinery, not flipping burgers.
This reads like the world is 100% at fault for your personal problems.
This is a big reason why rational people grow out of the far-left academia: not everything is capitalism’s fault.
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You should see how they do it in the service industry. No tests to get the job, but if you’re ever hurt at work and entitled to workman’s comp they give you a test and if you’ve smoked weed anytime in the last month the presumption is that you were high at work and not only do they not have to pay you for your injury but they just flat-out fire you.
The worker’s comp drug tests are such a disgusting example of late stage capitalism.
Imagine that you made a lot of money and lived comfortably off of the hard work of others. Then when one of those others got hurt while making money for you, you go out of your way to make sure you don’t have to help them cover the medical costs. Also, you take their only source of income away from them so they couldn’t even cover it themselves if they wanted to.
I can’t imagine being that heartless, and its literally just standard pretty much everywhere in the US. It is very saddening.
This is the intersection of two elements of our culture:
-
everyone must always do everything they can to make as much money as possible regardless of the consequences
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if someone uses drugs, they’re not a person anymore and it’s okay to hurt them as much as is within your power
-
This sounds like a talking point for the right about the “extreme” left. I don’t own a business but I also don’t expect them to foot the bill if I come to work drunk and it sounds pretty ridiculous to say they should. Saying addicts should get jobs and not worry about the consequences of coming to work under the influence is ridiculous. I’m all for helping people when they’re ready for help but giving them a pass for being reckless is too far.
A high person isn’t anymore dangerous than a sleep deprived person. Should they also be able to deny workman’s comp to someone for not getting enough sleep?
I agree that people shouldn’t go to work high or drunk, for the most part(honestly dont really care, I would judge my hypothetical workers solely on their work performance and behavior), but these tests catch substances used in the person’s freetime. An employer shouldn’t get to decide that just because someone got high in the safety of their home two weeks before being hurt on the job that they aren’t eligible for assistance. It’s pretty messed up.
I guess if they could somehow make a drug test that could test someone’s intoxication levels and tolerance at the exact time of the incident, then maybe it would be fair. Even then, they were hurt while attempting to make you money. I think it’s just the right thing to do, morally, regardless of the employee’s idiocy.
And yea I know, the right thinks any sort of empathetic idea is extreme.
Saying addicts should get jobs and not worry about the consequences of coming to work under the influence is ridiculous
that’s why no one is saying that. what we’re saying is that smoking weed a month ago shouldn’t cost you your job and your workmen’s comp if you get injured at work, and that this industry has used the drug war as an excuse to manufacture a system where absolutely none of the consequences of drug use are prevented but they can avoid paying people what they owe for forcing them to work long hours in unsafe environments under the guise of a “drug free workplace”.
Trying to think of someone who works in the service industry that doesn’t smoke weed…
Yeah, they’re never paying comp.
You know it’s all bullshit because they don’t/can’t test for alcohol dependence, which is way more devastating to a person’s productivity than cannabis.
My job breathalyzed me in addition to the piss test. I asked the attendant about the breathalyzer test, and she said that it’s common for people to fail it.
I recently learned that in NZ they will give you a breathalyzer test if you’ve done something such as have a vehicular collision or been speeding at something like 140 km/h in a 100 km/h zone. Even if you’re a cop on highway patrol duty; you get in a crash, another cop has to administer the test.
It really depends on the position and what they’re testing for. Do you really want a heavy machinery operator to be a cokehead or heroin addict? There is a real risk of them killing someone. Testing someone in a job like IT for smoking weed? That’s a different story.
Also a lot of the time they only test you post-hiring if you fucked up somehow.
It can definitely be used against people (usually the disenfranchised) though to prevent them being hired or to get them fired.
The place I work will fire you on the spot if you test positive for marijuana. Marijuana is legal in this state. If I smoke on the weekend, and then test positive on Wednesday, I lose my job.
However, if I get ripple-dee-doo-dah shit-faced Tuesday night, come in on Wednesday miserably hung over, I’ll pass that piss test. And still be more impaired than I would be from that joint I had Saturday night.
As a long time stoner, I agree that we are targeted more than nonusers simply because THC hangs out in the body a lot longer than other drugs. It would take me months to piss clean just so I could get a job at something like Family Dollar. It doesn’t matter if I was a drunk or did an 8 ball of coke a few days ago because that wouldn’t show up in a drug test.
Just because a drug is legal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tested for in scenarios where that is applicable. Many jobs do in fact test for alcohol.
I wouldn’t want my bus driver under the influence of anything (preferably not even sleep deprivation), but honestly couldn’t give less of a shit if the cashier was high out of their mind, so long as they do their job. Some jobs are more gray area. For instance, a chef or fast food worker fucking up could mean someone dying from anaphylactic shock.
Yeah but the half life for alcohol is way shorter than weed.
Even worse, alcohol is “zero order kinetics” meaning there is no halving, it gets fully metabolized in a given timespan.
Ya if a worker fucking up can directly result in someone dying, I’m not opposed to testing for hard drugs. They also only stay in your system for a few days so if someone can’t pass that, then you can probably find a better fit
I said this elsewhere in the thread- unless you are also giving random breathalyzers, this is a ridiculous and hypocritical policy because lots of people drink before going to work. And they’d be drunk right then and there, not at some unspecified point before the test was taken.
Many desk jobs would probably be reasonable to have testing on as well. People don’t realize how critical software is today. That same piece of heavy machinery has a cpu with thousands of lines of code sitting between the operator and the actual machinery.
I work in IT and about half the workforce smokes weed. I worked at a high frequency stock trading firm in NYC that made hundreds of millions of dollars per year and tons of the developers were high during work hours. We had quarterly open bar parties where the CEO himself would openly smoke weed.
Being high on THC doesn’t have the same effect on someone that is drunk, all coked up, or doped up on opiates. Smoking weed tends to open up people’s creative sides and it reduces stress and anxiety when something isn’t working the way you want it to. The same can’t be said for the others because they impair your ability to focus, your vision, and decision making.
Also as someone else said, there are only a few positions where being high as hell can seriously impact the company. Most of the time the stuff you do doesn’t have that much of an impact on the company in general.
Imagine thinking “my employees are performing great but maybe I should check their pee to be sure”
That’s the thing though. It’s never that. It’s more like
Sure my employees are doing fine, but maybe I can squeeze some more profit out of them if I make sure they aren’t enjoying themselves whatsoever
It’s our insurance gives us cheaper rates if we drug test, and we can fire you if you get hurt on the job and happened to smoke a joint last weekend.
Surely, it was the joint of marijuana weed last week that caused the accident! /S
It’s more like “These fucking insurance crooks will drop my company if I don’t drug test my employees even though it’s a waste of time and money and an invasion of privacy.”
Why does it have to be the employees doing great or fine?
Some of my employees aren’t performing well or are assholes, but I don’t have enough grounds to fire them yet.
Not that a drug test would be the best way to solve that… but it seems like a plausible thought process.
Damn, América really is crazy. I wouldn’t accept such tests and I’ve never even tried drugs.
Depends what your job was. If you’re my 747 pilot I would be outraged if you refused a drugs test when asked.
There’s a time and a place for regulated drugs tests.
Here is one guy who should’ve been drug tested before doing any work. “Several of his friends recalled him going to work after a night of doing drugs, with one of them saying he would never allow Duntsch to operate on him.”
Holy shit as if I needed another reason to never go to a hospital in Texas. What a read
The best (worst?) quote was the doctor who said that Duntsch acted in one surgery as if he was deliberately trying to do the opposite of everything you are supposed to. That made him think it was deliberate and not just being “out of it” or incompetent.
They can’t do this in Europe unless it’s actually dangerous for the job, medical professional, operating heavy industrial machinery, cop etc. It’s just because the US has no worker rights laws.
You don’t want someone who is still high driving a train, but it’s probably fine if all I need to do is off work.
I’ve also never heard anyone get tested more than once and you can take the test when you want. If you can’t produce clean piss once in your life, then you might have a problem.
Those are generally the same industries performing the drug tests in the US, too. They only test if they’re required to by OSHA, DOT, or insurance due to the nature of the work (i.e. “safety sensitive” roles). I’ve never done a drug test for an office job or basic labor; but I get regularly tested for my DOT related job.
Meanwhile I’ve been tested in order to work at Walmart and Jiffy Lube when I was younger.
Walmart and jiffy lube both have heavy equipment
Walmart had a forklift that was only used by certain certified individuals but jiffy lube had no heavy equipment.
Didn’t have a lift?
Point is, they both can have stuff, regardless of if you are the dude to operate it
No there was no lift or any other heavy equipment or machinery. We had a floor jack and hand tools. I find the idea that US employers drug test primarily for OSHA compliance or due to heavy equipment quite absurd. It’s about discrimination (for both the right and wrong reasons) plain and simple.
Discrimination against who?
In Canada (and I think in most of the world) it’s illegal to randomly test employees unless you have reasonable cause.
Testing of an individual employee may be allowed in specific cases where there is reasonable cause to believe the employee is impaired by drugs or alcohol while on duty or is unable to work safely due to impairment from alcohol or drugs.
Pre-hire and pre-site-access are both still legal though
I am so glad my new job doesn’t test unless if there is an industrial accident or in very specific dangerous positions where it is warranted. Handbook basically says don’t show up to work fucked up. What you do on your own time is your business.
It is a huge breach of privacy, especially when you have to start disclosing legally prescribed medications that they test for. Why a company has a right to my body, my medical history, or any other private information is nuts.
The fact that there is a system, run by Equifax of course, where employers can choose to hand your work history, paystubs, and other information to and then other companies can then pay to get access to is also nuts. You can request to have it frozen, but who the hell even knows to do this? It is messed up.
The main thing is, as long as you don’t show up to work blitzed I don’t see how anyone should give a shit. Whatever you do at home is your business, provided you leave it at home.
That’s the policy at my business. IDGAF if you spend all of your off hours at the bottom of a bottle or on top of cloud nine, just don’t bring it to work.
Additional problems include: If there is a workplace accident and someone gets injured, both OSHA and insurance companies immediately come knocking to try to do drug tests on everyone involved purely as an attempt to shift blame and deny claims. We don’t have any heavy equipment here or anything so I’m not too worried about that, but there are businesses in America that would get fucked in a situation like that so they’re kind of forced to enact drug bans even if management doesn’t want to on a personal level.
If you’re driving a bus I don’t want you even “buzzed” in the slightest
Which is a problem that pre-employment drug testing does not correct in any way, shape or form.
Pre employment and post accident seems completely fine.
- “Reasonable suspicion” if someone seems altered.
I’ll agree randoms are dumb and invasive.
Post accident is fine because the question there is “were you actively impaired while working” which is a valid concern. What is pre-employment testing supposed to show that’s relevant to the vast majority of jobs though? “Sometimes this person uses recreational drugs.” Ok, and what? Are they coming to work impaired? If not, then outside of the medical field and airline pilots, who cares?
Why on earth should a corporation be allowed to require a privacy violating urine test as a condition for employment for a desk job? And even for safety critical jobs like medical or pilots, a pre-employment urine test isn’t going to catch abuse of the one drug that is the biggest red flag in the entire collection: alcohol.
Many hyper critical jobs have drug screens every time you enter the job site
That’s not relevant to pre-employment testing being literally useless for the vast majority of jobs
Why not? Can’t be sober and clean for day 1 after getting an offer?
I agree, but some jobs I can see why, like if you’re an air traffic controller, operate heavy machinery, etc. Government jobs and Government contractors ($100k+ contracts) also require them but that’s a government job…
My biggest fear is failing one when I haven’t taken anything. I never have, but I know people who have. I’ve also known people who have passed after getting totally blitzed the night before. They are wildly inaccurate, aside from being an invasion of privacy.
I read, when you eat stuff with poppy seeds, some tests are false positive, because the plants are closely related.
Not closely related, Opium is made from the same plant as poppy seeds, the plant is aptly named the opium poppy. (This is the cash crop of afghanistan, which supplies 80% of the worlds opiate demand as of 2021, down from 90% in 2011, but currently in the rise again.) Old info see comment below
The seeds dont have opiates in them, but the fluid in the seed pod (or something like that) does so the seeds are typically contaminated with opiates.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Opium_cultivation_Afghanistan_2022.pdf
That info is outdated; the Taliban have heavily cracked down on opium cultivation to the extent that their total crop yield saw a “95% decline from 6,200 tons produced in 2022 to 333 tons in 2023”.
https://www.unodc.org/documents/crop-monitoring/Afghanistan/Afghanistan_opium_survey_2023.pdf
I did not know that, thank you for the link. That graph of production looks like my stock portfolio lol.
I remember in the 2000s reading that production soared after we invaded and kicked the taliban back. Wonder how this will impact the heroin epidemic.
It’s an interesting question! My understanding is that it may affect opiates like heroin, but not opioids (fentanyl, oxycodone, novacaine etc) as opiates are naturally derived whereas opioids are synthetic.
This opinion piece from Chatham House says before 2023, Afghanistan was responsible for over 80% of global opium supply, so I’d say the impact on the heroin market will be significant to say the least.
In my armchair opinion, I think we’re likely to see opioids like fentanyl fill that gap. That scares me a lot given the relative strengths at identical concentrations of heroin and fentanyl vary so wildly.
opiates.
I worked for a US company in the past and in my contract there was a phrase that I’m going to paraphrase. “Can be sent to unannounced drug tests (US only)”
This isn’t a worldwide issue.
