My wife just called me after going to work for her pay stub because she was asked to sign a new policy regarding the new smoke free policies that the company is adopting in three days. The news is a little upsetting to me, and I have some very specific actions I will be taking tonight on the issue, because of how far they are taking it.

At first it was just a ban on smoking on company property, which is reasonable in itself. Though to be technical about it, they only own the building on the land, while the state owns the land and makes it very clear what they allow companies to ban.

Then it was increased to a job function ban, meaning that an employee could not smoke at anytime while on the job. This implies that an employee cannot smoke on breaks, whether for lunch or rest, and that crosses the line in one way. On a rest break it is one thing to say that employees can’t smoke, because they are still on the clock and being paid for that time. On a lunch break however, since this company does not pay for lunch breaks, they cross the boundaries of telling an employee what to do when not on the clock.

A lot of people relate this issue to the drug testing policies used at almost every company in existence, but it doesn’t match it at all. When a company is testing for drug use, they are not testing to see if an employee was high or otherwise impaired while on the clock, they are testing for on the lock activities as well as off the clock. The reason, therefore, that an employee can be punished for failing a drug test at work is because there is no way to determine if an employee has ever been on drugs while working. It must be assumed that the use of drugs is a safety hazard at all times, since it cannot be verified down to a specific time frame.

Smoking cigarettes does not pose the same safety issues, which is why no employer safety organization has ever implanted policy regarding it. They do, however, offer policy on what an employer may or may not deem as work time, which is the only time they have any authority over. There are even two sets of laws for that, one from the state and one from the federal government. And just to be clear, both, regardless of what state, make it clear that when a federal law conflicts with a state law, the one that favors the employee most will be the effective law.

I bring this up because today, my wife was asked to sign a new part of the policy, and this new part introduces a similar trait to when the federal and sate labor laws conflict. It says that if a smoker and a non-smoker are in conflict, the non-smoker will be given precedence over the smoker. Does that sound right to you? How about legal? Yeah, me neither.

It also says that employees may not smoke before coming to work, how about that one, fair? Right? Legal? I didn’t think so.

The simple facts are that as an employee, I will smoke whenever I feel like it, so long as a job function does not prohibit it. Meaning that when I am on a paid break, if I am not allowed to smoke, then so be it. But when I clock out and am officially on my own time, basically anytime when I can say no to doing any sort of work with any sort of repercussion from that choice, then I will smoke if I want to smoke.

My employer can then say that I can’t smoke on the property, fine, I will sit in my car and smoke, because that is my property and it is parked on government property. If they say that leaving cigarette butts lying around is littering, fine, I have to abide by that way of thinking and not make a mess.

This is how it has been for many years, and the reason is because while I am not on company time, the company has no control over what I do. So why do we think we can change it now? My wife’s job isn’t saying that it is being done to save on insurance costs, which would be kind of dumb since it won’t save anything there. True, insurance rates are higher for a smoker in most cases, but smokers often turn to unhealthy foods when they can’t smoke, which causes even more health risks than smoking.

Look at it this way, if I smoke for 40 years of my life, all while having the same insurance policy, how often am I going to use my insurance because of a smoke related illness? For the last few years of my life, and nothing more. So for those 40 years while I was smoking and damaging my lungs, I was paying my insurance premiums every month without using those benefits for smoking related issues.

So given my current job, I get paid on the 5th and 20th of every month, that’s twice a month that I am paid, and I pay $50 out of each check to insurance. 40 years at that rate means that I will have paid $48,000 into my insurance policy, plus the contributions from my employer and the state. Many of you may not know this if you haven’t watched a loved one die of smoking illnesses, but oxygen and two medications are all you can do to help it, which isn’t that damn expensive.

Carter Blood Care crossed the line with the smoking bans on breaks, but they crossed a bigger line when they said a non-smoker had more rights than a smoker. To top it all off, they didn’t even have a decent reason for doing it, the insurance doesn’t matter that much even if they had ever made that claim, which they didn’t.

Carter Blood Care forgets that even if a smoker doesn’t smoke while in uniform, which just a pair of very generic scrubs without any marking of Carter Blood Care on them at all, they smoke in their homes and in their cars, which causes the odor of smoking to rub off on the uniforms. Are they going to say next that we can’t be smokers at all because of that?

I know some companies do, but ONLY those that take on a serious and often life threatening risk by allowing smokers to work for them, such as plastics companies. The law has made a clear stand on that one as well.

I assume Carter Blood Care is thinking that employees will just deal with it because they don’t know their rights well enough to enforce them, but maybe they aren’t counting on one person not only knowing her rights, but taking action to inform others and grouping together to enforce them. I know it seems like a stretch for people to actually organize in order to protect rights, I mean it’s been decades since it has been done effectively in our country, but it is what our country was founded on, the right to enforce our rights. Read the constitution.

The one problem that Carter Blood Care didn’t anticipate though, is me. I don’t stand by and watch atrocities like this take place, that would be counterproductive to my beliefs, and a hypocrite I am not.

They didn’t count on anyone being vigilant enough to cause a problem for them, but tonight I will be contacting every news agency in town with evidence of their unlawful act of favoring the rights of one group over another, and we’ll see how they like it.

By the way, the company I am speaking of is Carter Blood Care, and they can be reached at http://www.carterbloodcare.org, at least they can when their website is working properly.