If I'm a hiring manager, I'm going to use every piece of information I can (legally) glean about a potential hire to determine if they are fit and qualified for a job, and if they have personal qualities that make them well suited for my corporate culture. When a potential hire fails at a simple and arbitrary / meaningless task, that's going to count heavily against them.
As a hiring manager, I despise the fact that I can be prevented from hiring talent by an abitrary metric that I didn't define. I don't need help paring down my talent pool, and any metric that isn't actually based on talent is counterproductive.
In my field telling me I can't hire a person because they get high on the weekend is like telling me I can't hire them because their favorite color is purple. It makes zero difference to me, or to our work, but it's a policy from on high, so I can't do shit about it.
(It is absolutely an insurance / third party compliance thing in our case)
My company does staffing
We do staff a lot of stuff where safety is a legit concern - we do a lot of forklift drivers, for instance
But in our case, we are often two or three steps away from the decision to drug test.
It comes from the client, who has an insurance requirement that everybody be tested.
Corporate bureaucracy ahoy!
We had a staffing company place a helpdesk guy with us and then pull him when he failed a drug test like 3 weeks later
talk about a shitshow.
0
Options
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Alright, so we've agreed then? Drug testing is alright if it is timely, applicable to a job that involves potentially Very Serious consequences (huge amounts of money or bodily harm), and is viewed in the context that a positive result need not result in disciplinary action if it can be shown that the employee was on a drug that is or ought to be legal and had a really meaningful experience over the weekend I mean have you ever really looked at an old-growth forest
Alright, so we've agreed then? Drug testing is alright if it is timely, applicable to a job that involves potentially Very Serious consequences (huge amounts of money or bodily harm), and is viewed in the context that a positive result need not result in disciplinary action if it can be shown that the employee was on a drug that is or ought to be legal and had a really meaningful experience over the weekend I mean have you ever really looked at an old-growth forest
Brb, marketing a new strain of weed named "Pine Passion."
But yeah, I think that's more or less everything boiled down really. Drug testing is pretty bullshit for most positions but when safety is a legitimate issue it makes a lot of sense.
Canadian nuclear power plants do not do drug testing unless there is suspicion of impairment. no random testing, no testing at hiring.
Yeah; most places here do not do any drug screening at all, and yet we don't have a dramatically increased number of workplace accidents.
I think I've seen more man hours lost & more on-site fuck-ups as a result of people calling in sick to play Skyrim than anything else, and/or not calling in sick, but coming to work after an all-nighter playing Skyrim (and then admitting to it after falling asleep on the job).
Maybe we should screen for video games. Shit's dangerous!
Alright, so here's my spiel on drug testing as it pertains to my particular work place, why it's ineffective at best, why I think the company does it, and overall answering the initial question 'why drug testing is a bad thing'. To begin, our whole company enacts a policy of 'random drug testing'. Now, a little birdy told me that there are laws in place if a company is to practice actual random testing, and not targeted. I can't confirm this, I don't know the laws. But what I see as far as numbers go look more like random with a huge asterisk after it. Jobs within the company vary from office work, a lot of retail customer service (cashiering, phones, etc), some dock workers (most but not all of whom also drive forklifts) and large truck deliverers (semi trucks, company flatbeds). So there's definitely a spectrum of 'hey this job is safe enough for toddlers' to 'only by a trained professional'.
Back to how I mentioned the not-so-random, before I transferred from one larger store to a much smaller one, there was an incident where the entire store was subjected to drug testing over the course of the day. Like any of these tests, if you refuse you're fired. Prior to that, in the 5 years I had been working at previous store, my name came up maybe twice. Always with another employee, and we would drive to the clinic, pee in the cup, and come back. This situation was much more serious, including having security present. There act was legally questionable because, apparently on the forms you take to the clinic, they were all marked as 'reasonable suspicion'. Which, one, the company did NOT have reasonable suspicion for the entire store, and two, that mark can stay with your record apparently, as one employee was hoping to get into private security or police academy within a few years, and that's not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head. The store was pissed. Almost everyone wrote letters to our CEO, stating their outrage. There was at thinly veiled apology, but it wasn't even that, it was more of 'our policy needs reviewing'. The end result of this is that there hasn't been a 'random drug test' at that location since, well over two years and almost certainly an indicator that names are either not being selected randomly, or if they are, certain names are being put 'back in the hat' so to speak.
If random drug testing really is effective in stopping workplace accidents, and I would imagine also has the spinoff effect of increasing worker health and reliability, then why would people fight against a safer workplace?
I understand that from the employee side of things, what they do on their own time isn't of the company's concern. Additionally, if someone only smoked pot occasionally, there's very little risk in activity like that affecting their performance. The pot smokers aren't the people who concern me, but the people who do the more dangerous drugs. If you give a free pass to the pot smokers, you're essentially giving a free pass to all drugs.
As it's been pointed out, you have to look at what's being tested for. Alcohol? Certainly if you were still drunk, but you can drink your ass off the night before, have a wicked hangover, but still accomplish your job. Contrastingly, you can smoke weeks before, not have been under the influence since the day after you smoked, but be tested positively and be out of a job. There's no contesting results. And from what I've seen, false positives are too common (if they happen, that's too common. Loosing a job to a clerical or machine error is BS). Now on my end, I don't even know how I'd defend myself if I got a false positive; I haven't smoked in over a year, that was my one and only time, friends can back me up on this, but again there's no room for defense. You come up positive, you're gone. No warnings. You mentioned giving other drugs a free pass; they're already given a free pass. I had a boss who would leave on her lunch, come back late, high on prescription meds, and they wouldn't test her. And if they did, all she had to mention was having a prescription. But I'm still fairly certain that they wouldn't even test her for prescription drugs because our company, like many, was using pee tests, and to my knowledge, the cheapest tests are basically looking for marijuana and few other things.
And this is likely why our company, and many others, hold onto random drug testing. It's a do-not-pass-go do-not-go-through-union (in our case) way of firing someone, for starters, and it's also become status quo enough that there's no expectation to ever remove the policy. For most people, the company gets to tout 'safety' and 'customer awareness' or whatever other business-y buzzwords and keep the majority on their side.
I see workplace drug testing as a positive for a company when seen through the eyes of a business, but I also know that there is a lot of opposition against it. Help me see the other side, and explain why drug testing is a bad thing.
[/quote]
It's a bad thing because of the inaccuracy of it all, the stigmatism of marijuana smokers (no matter the frequency) over any other drug users (including things like alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, etc) combined with the outdated fear of 'Reefer madness', and ultimately your work controlling what you do outside of work with no real consequences to your job.
You mentioned workplace safety, and others have suggested that many things can influence a lack of safety in an work environment. Drugs as well as psychological conditions can put many people at risk, operators or not. But this is a case of addressing the issue, not trying to blanket out one cause and thinking all your problems are solved. We get tested immediately if we are ever involved in an accident, defined as requiring medical assistance or costing physical damage. And this makes sense; if someone fucked up because they're high on anything, they should be held responsible for that. Some might answer that it could be too late for a victim, but I suspect these incidents are on a impossibly smaller scale than those workers who are lost to lack of common sense, a drop in responsibility, improper work procedures, and many other factors that have nothing to do with your mental condition under the influence of any drugs. Random drug testing is as much a controlling factor as it is a bandage solution to a huge problem in the work force.
Steam
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
I have no issues with drug testing people who run nuclear reactors. It's a high-risk position that - dear God, I hope - pays well enough to compensate for some loss of autonomy. It's a different conversation than talking about the 99.9 percent of jobs that do not involve heavy machinery or nuclear fission.
My experience in the working world, though, is that the higher you rise professionally, the less likely you are to be subjected to a test. Food service and retail were, for me, the places where I had to piss to get a job.
You're also talking about high-stress jobs.
Trust me, you don't want your career field to end up like the military. Yeah, there's random drug testing, testing after accidents, and bigger punishments than the civilian world could ever offer for offenders. On the other hand, singling out specific drugs and ignoring fatigue, alcohol, and tobacco use has created a situation where we consecutively lose more people to drunk driving and fatigue related accidents than we do to bullets, bombs or knives even at the height of a war.
High-stress fields need an outlet, and no one wants to be the person who's seen as being unable to handle the situation. Taking legal drugs and going to a psychiatrist usually means having people look at you crosswise or think you're about to snap regardless of how educated they are.
Yeah, being high on the job is stupid, stupid stupid. But that's not what drug tests check for, they test to see if you got high in the last week or month. The way you mitigate the problem is by actually treating your people like people and paying attention to them.
Drug testing is a poor policy, period. I don't care if your company specialized in synchronized nuclear warhead juggling - the best that a random drug test will do is provide a false sense of security. On the long list of things that will impair human performance, using drugs a few nights ago must be somewhere near the bottom. Even being high on the job would not be near the top (though being drunk probably would be. Then again, it's usually pretty obvious when you're impaired to that extent without the need for a drug test).
Being distracted, being untrained, being depressed and being fatigued are the primary causes, by a mile, for workplace related accidents. But minimizing distractions, giving appropriate training to employees & supporting depressed employees is expensive, time consuming and often involves employing specialists in those fields, so it's not done. Instead, we focus on 'drug testing' because it's easy, cheap and it's simple to scare people with the image of high employees crashing airplanes or running people over with bulldozers or whatever other nonsense.
Fatigue's probably the best example there is of a demonstrable safety risk that employers don't give two fucks about, with a solution that's simply but it creates a 'slacker culture', so fuck it, pretend it's not a real problem. Dowell Schlumberger in the 90s (the 'orange truck' era in Alberta) had a problem with driving incidents: drivers were just falling asleep at the wheel and crashing into all sorts of crazy things, from gas station overhangs to culverts to other vehicles. If memory serves, the incident rate for serious accidents was about 1 every 15~ days in a year.
So, one day, the safety contractor says, "Hey, Road Train uses a nap schedule for their equipment operators & drivers, and it brought down their incident rate. Maybe you guys should try it out,"
They do, and incident rates for that year drop to 1 every 60~ days. That's still pretty bad, I suppose, but the improvement was huge. Then the parent company Schlumberger decides that they want to micro-manage their operations; 'Dowell' gets dropped as a name, the trucks are repainted white, and Jesus, that nap policy had to go! What, was the company just full of lazy bums? Just fire everybody that can't handle the work!
Sure enough, they go back to 1 incident every 15~ days, no matter how many 'bums' they fire.
Interesting you bring that company up. I had a job interview with them, and I asked various employees of that company what the most consecutive hours they worked was.
One person honestly answered 40 hours.
Forty hours.
but he was 100% drug free
If you're interested, I was hired by them but chose other employment. Truthfully even with the above posts I was impressed by them and I think they are a good company
I had one of our employees that worked in our metal fabrication warehouse (roofing and siding panels, and flashing and what have you) poached from us by another company, with the offer of better pay than I would be allowed to give him.
He was a great employee. Always responsible, always on time, worked 50 hours a week without ever making a mistake or failing in any of his responsibilities and he was a really nice guy on top of all of that. I was actually happy this other place could pay him better.
They fired him after one week because of random drug testing.
Told him that he showed 'possible traces of pot'. OH NO!
So he's back with us again, and it really is their loss.
I used to work in risk management, so I have some level of perspective on this (though admittedly I was focused on different aspects of it).
Most companies drug test for the insurance discount.
The safest and best companies bake safety into their culture and hire responsible people, as there's no "responsible person" test and you have to fully commit to making things safe. Drug tests are often a way for a company to have an out when really it's the company's fault for having shitty management and culture.
Good companies don't care AND get bigger discounts because their accident rates are so low.
Interesting you bring that company up. I had a job interview with them, and I asked various employees of that company what the most consecutive hours they worked was.
One person honestly answered 40 hours.
Forty hours.
but he was 100% drug free
If you're interested, I was hired by them but chose other employment. Truthfully even with the above posts I was impressed by them and I think they are a good company
I've had a work day(s?) like that before, not 40 hours though. It was about 24 hours, but it was very physically-demanding labor. Field work. Pounding stakes, wrapping huge cables, hauling heavy things from point A to point B, few short breaks.
Luckily it was just a one-time thing, but by the end of it I was making stupid mistakes, like forgetting to tell our survey equipment that there were cables attached to it. I would certainly have been in less danger if I had just toked up and worked a regular 8-hour day.
After getting chewed out by my wife, I have very strict work hour limits and I take full breaks. I've never been intoxicated on the job before, but I've been exhausted and that shit's not worth it. If you have a project going on that needs 16+ hours of consecutive labor, hire another person temporarily to do the work in shifts.
My company has had clients request that staffers come in consecutive 16-hour shifts for a total of 32 hours of work in a row.
:winky:
+3
Options
AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I work around legally-administrated narcotics all day, so it's reasonable to expect the occasional drug test at my job, especially when the expected supply of these substances comes up wrong at routine counting.
What is totally shitty is that the company has the right to fire you if you test positive THC (which we don't carry) when they're testing you for the substances we administer. This happened to someone I worked with, and it not only cost her job, but her license as well.
I used to work in risk management, so I have some level of perspective on this (though admittedly I was focused on different aspects of it).
Most companies drug test for the insurance discount.
That's pretty much it. The pharmaceutical company mentioned above is really about the only place where random drug testing during employment makes sense.
I get to go to a lot of different customers factories in my job, and the guy I was working took a nail in his foot. The next day, the big, 'no accidents in X days' banner was still up in the 60s, because they had some sort of incentive going, and so if at all possible didn't report accidents.
Meanwhile, another one incentivized reporting accidents, using some kind of lottery system where you got something in a monthly drawing of names for everyone who'd submitted a report.
No cookie for guessing which method actually created a safer working environment.
What annoys more than drug testing is the credit check. Seriously, mind you own damn business.
It feels like they are trying to see if you are desperate for money or something. It is creepy.
Several states - mostly on the West Coast - have made this illegal. Apparently, it has had the perverse effect of rendering people who got hit really hard in '08 permanently unemployable. California, especially, had a huge problem with this.
I used to work in risk management, so I have some level of perspective on this (though admittedly I was focused on different aspects of it).
Most companies drug test for the insurance discount.
That's pretty much it. The pharmaceutical company mentioned above is really about the only place where random drug testing during employment makes sense.
I get to go to a lot of different customers factories in my job, and the guy I was working took a nail in his foot. The next day, the big, 'no accidents in X days' banner was still up in the 60s, because they had some sort of incentive going, and so if at all possible didn't report accidents.
Meanwhile, another one incentivized reporting accidents, using some kind of lottery system where you got something in a monthly drawing of names for everyone who'd submitted a report.
No cookie for guessing which method actually created a safer working environment.
I want that no cookie, so I'll guess the factory that had the guy put a nail in his foot. That had to be the safer place.
What annoys more than drug testing is the credit check. Seriously, mind you own damn business.
It feels like they are trying to see if you are desperate for money or something. It is creepy.
Several states - mostly on the West Coast - have made this illegal. Apparently, it has had the perverse effect of rendering people who got hit really hard in '08 permanently unemployable. California, especially, had a huge problem with this.
there are a bunch of easy exceptions in the California law so it didn't really help the workers who needed it most
I'm not opposed to the law, don't get me wrong. I think it's a good law. But some of the exceptions are too broad.
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
Sorry, you get credit checked for job applications in the US?!?!?!?
That's appalling!
Yep. See if you have shitty credit it means you are not good at managing your life, have priorities that will make you a poor employee, or are unlucky.
I don't really buy the argument that random drug tests are meant to determine if you're showing up to work high because it legitimately poses a safety risk. It's a nice cover story, and I'm sure some people actually believe it, but I don't think that's the actual reasoning.
I think the actual reasoning is that if you ever use recreational drugs (discounting tobacco and alcohol, of course, because reasons), it means you make bad decisions, and nobody wants people who make bad decisions in important positions. Because if you're the sort of person who'll light up on the weekends, well, you're probably the sort of person who'll stick a bobble-head through the paper-shredder just to see what happens.
It's also another easy way to pare down the huge number of qualified applicants for a position.
I'm not going to lie - if I'm a hiring manager, I don't want a person who can't get their shit together enough to piss clean at a job interview.
You know it's coming, and you know how to pass it - don't smoke weed for a week or two, don't do drugs a few days before. If you can't even get that right, you PROBABLY are going to be problematic in other areas.
I don't even care if someone cheats and gets away with it, if you can't pass that incredibly low bar, there's someone who can.
I've also never known a workplace to have you take a drug test unless they were already seriously considering hiring you. There are cheaper and easier ways to pare down a huge pool of qualified applicants - the drug test is a final part of the process, not the first part.
heavy marijuana users can piss dirty for a looooong time after they quit smoking, dude
i know this because of reasons.
0
Options
silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
So it sounds like workplace fatigue is the real killer here. But what is the solution? Requiring employees get 10 hours off before being required to report for another shift (enough time to commute both ways and get 8 hours of sleep)? Capping the number of hours someone can work in a row without a break (say at 16)? Because while these might be healthy changes that improve worker quality of life and productivity, I can't imagine the response to such proposals being anything other than "hire people who can function with coffee or Red Bull instead of sleep."
Full disclosure: my job requires me to finish at 11PM and report for another shift the next day at 6:30 AM. No I am not able to successfully sleep between shifts.
So it sounds like workplace fatigue is the real killer here. But what is the solution? Requiring employees get 10 hours off before being required to report for another shift (enough time to commute both ways and get 8 hours of sleep)? Capping the number of hours someone can work in a row without a break (say at 16)? Because while these might be healthy changes that improve worker quality of life and productivity, I can't imagine the response to such proposals being anything other than "hire people who can function with coffee or Red Bull instead of sleep."
Full disclosure: my job requires me to finish at 11PM and report for another shift the next day at 6:30 AM. No I am not able to successfully sleep between shifts.
There's a big problem in Australia with police moonlighting at other jobs. The scheduling gives them something like 3 on 2 off per week for exactly the reason that they work weird hours in a dangerous and important job, but the problem is a lot of cops pick up extra work on the side (shift work is about the only thing available) so they don't really get the proper recuperation time (arguably it's a lot worse for them).
Yes, the solution is to cap the number of hours you can work in a row, and to have a minimum number of hours in between shifts. In my province these are legislated into law. Some employers may take it a step further.
Yes, the solution is to cap the number of hours you can work in a row, and to have a minimum number of hours in between shifts. In my province these are legislated into law. Some employers may take it a step further.
The solution is to both pass laws and make it extremely easy for employees and anyone effected to sue for heavy damages if an employer violates them.
Yes, the solution is to cap the number of hours you can work in a row, and to have a minimum number of hours in between shifts. In my province these are legislated into law. Some employers may take it a step further.
The solution is to both pass laws and make it extremely easy for employees and anyone effected to sue for heavy damages if an employer violates them.
Yes, the solution is to cap the number of hours you can work in a row, and to have a minimum number of hours in between shifts. In my province these are legislated into law. Some employers may take it a step further.
The solution is to both pass laws and make it extremely easy for employees and anyone effected to sue for heavy damages if an employer violates them.
Why are you guys so anti-business?
Because businesses are anti-worker quality of life?
Plus some jobs just can't function without 26 hour shifts and no guarantee of uninterrupted sleep time while on duty
What should happen is that jobs need to pass stringent criteria to be able to do this kind of thing
Marty: The future, it's where you're going? Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Plus some jobs just can't function without 26 hour shifts and no guarantee of uninterrupted sleep time while on duty
What should happen is that jobs need to pass stringent criteria to be able to do this kind of thing
Such as? I imagine that any job that requires people to stay on duty for 26-hours straight either doesn't need to be done well, has a high tolerance for fuck-ups and worker death or could actually function better with an extra shift.
+2
Options
silence1186Character shields down!As a wingmanRegistered Userregular
Plus some jobs just can't function without 26 hour shifts and no guarantee of uninterrupted sleep time while on duty
What should happen is that jobs need to pass stringent criteria to be able to do this kind of thing
Such as? I imagine that any job that requires people to stay on duty for 26-hours straight either doesn't need to be done well, has a high tolerance for fuck-ups and worker death or could actually function better with an extra shift.
Firefighters (that I know, anyway) work 24 hour shifts. I think they go one day on two days off.
Posts
"Well, look, the waitress was clumsy and spilled my clam chowder all over my lap, then I tried to clean it up before coming in I swear!"
We had a staffing company place a helpdesk guy with us and then pull him when he failed a drug test like 3 weeks later
talk about a shitshow.
Brb, marketing a new strain of weed named "Pine Passion."
But yeah, I think that's more or less everything boiled down really. Drug testing is pretty bullshit for most positions but when safety is a legitimate issue it makes a lot of sense.
Everyone knows Canadian uranium is too polite to meltdown.
Yeah; most places here do not do any drug screening at all, and yet we don't have a dramatically increased number of workplace accidents.
I think I've seen more man hours lost & more on-site fuck-ups as a result of people calling in sick to play Skyrim than anything else, and/or not calling in sick, but coming to work after an all-nighter playing Skyrim (and then admitting to it after falling asleep on the job).
Maybe we should screen for video games. Shit's dangerous!
Back to how I mentioned the not-so-random, before I transferred from one larger store to a much smaller one, there was an incident where the entire store was subjected to drug testing over the course of the day. Like any of these tests, if you refuse you're fired. Prior to that, in the 5 years I had been working at previous store, my name came up maybe twice. Always with another employee, and we would drive to the clinic, pee in the cup, and come back. This situation was much more serious, including having security present. There act was legally questionable because, apparently on the forms you take to the clinic, they were all marked as 'reasonable suspicion'. Which, one, the company did NOT have reasonable suspicion for the entire store, and two, that mark can stay with your record apparently, as one employee was hoping to get into private security or police academy within a few years, and that's not the kind of thing you want hanging over your head. The store was pissed. Almost everyone wrote letters to our CEO, stating their outrage. There was at thinly veiled apology, but it wasn't even that, it was more of 'our policy needs reviewing'. The end result of this is that there hasn't been a 'random drug test' at that location since, well over two years and almost certainly an indicator that names are either not being selected randomly, or if they are, certain names are being put 'back in the hat' so to speak.
As it's been pointed out, you have to look at what's being tested for. Alcohol? Certainly if you were still drunk, but you can drink your ass off the night before, have a wicked hangover, but still accomplish your job. Contrastingly, you can smoke weeks before, not have been under the influence since the day after you smoked, but be tested positively and be out of a job. There's no contesting results. And from what I've seen, false positives are too common (if they happen, that's too common. Loosing a job to a clerical or machine error is BS). Now on my end, I don't even know how I'd defend myself if I got a false positive; I haven't smoked in over a year, that was my one and only time, friends can back me up on this, but again there's no room for defense. You come up positive, you're gone. No warnings. You mentioned giving other drugs a free pass; they're already given a free pass. I had a boss who would leave on her lunch, come back late, high on prescription meds, and they wouldn't test her. And if they did, all she had to mention was having a prescription. But I'm still fairly certain that they wouldn't even test her for prescription drugs because our company, like many, was using pee tests, and to my knowledge, the cheapest tests are basically looking for marijuana and few other things.
And this is likely why our company, and many others, hold onto random drug testing. It's a do-not-pass-go do-not-go-through-union (in our case) way of firing someone, for starters, and it's also become status quo enough that there's no expectation to ever remove the policy. For most people, the company gets to tout 'safety' and 'customer awareness' or whatever other business-y buzzwords and keep the majority on their side.
[/quote]
It's a bad thing because of the inaccuracy of it all, the stigmatism of marijuana smokers (no matter the frequency) over any other drug users (including things like alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, etc) combined with the outdated fear of 'Reefer madness', and ultimately your work controlling what you do outside of work with no real consequences to your job.
You mentioned workplace safety, and others have suggested that many things can influence a lack of safety in an work environment. Drugs as well as psychological conditions can put many people at risk, operators or not. But this is a case of addressing the issue, not trying to blanket out one cause and thinking all your problems are solved. We get tested immediately if we are ever involved in an accident, defined as requiring medical assistance or costing physical damage. And this makes sense; if someone fucked up because they're high on anything, they should be held responsible for that. Some might answer that it could be too late for a victim, but I suspect these incidents are on a impossibly smaller scale than those workers who are lost to lack of common sense, a drop in responsibility, improper work procedures, and many other factors that have nothing to do with your mental condition under the influence of any drugs. Random drug testing is as much a controlling factor as it is a bandage solution to a huge problem in the work force.
3DS FC: 4699-5714-8940 Playing Pokemon, add me! Ho, SATAN!
You're also talking about high-stress jobs.
Trust me, you don't want your career field to end up like the military. Yeah, there's random drug testing, testing after accidents, and bigger punishments than the civilian world could ever offer for offenders. On the other hand, singling out specific drugs and ignoring fatigue, alcohol, and tobacco use has created a situation where we consecutively lose more people to drunk driving and fatigue related accidents than we do to bullets, bombs or knives even at the height of a war.
High-stress fields need an outlet, and no one wants to be the person who's seen as being unable to handle the situation. Taking legal drugs and going to a psychiatrist usually means having people look at you crosswise or think you're about to snap regardless of how educated they are.
Yeah, being high on the job is stupid, stupid stupid. But that's not what drug tests check for, they test to see if you got high in the last week or month. The way you mitigate the problem is by actually treating your people like people and paying attention to them.
Being distracted, being untrained, being depressed and being fatigued are the primary causes, by a mile, for workplace related accidents. But minimizing distractions, giving appropriate training to employees & supporting depressed employees is expensive, time consuming and often involves employing specialists in those fields, so it's not done. Instead, we focus on 'drug testing' because it's easy, cheap and it's simple to scare people with the image of high employees crashing airplanes or running people over with bulldozers or whatever other nonsense.
Fatigue's probably the best example there is of a demonstrable safety risk that employers don't give two fucks about, with a solution that's simply but it creates a 'slacker culture', so fuck it, pretend it's not a real problem. Dowell Schlumberger in the 90s (the 'orange truck' era in Alberta) had a problem with driving incidents: drivers were just falling asleep at the wheel and crashing into all sorts of crazy things, from gas station overhangs to culverts to other vehicles. If memory serves, the incident rate for serious accidents was about 1 every 15~ days in a year.
So, one day, the safety contractor says, "Hey, Road Train uses a nap schedule for their equipment operators & drivers, and it brought down their incident rate. Maybe you guys should try it out,"
They do, and incident rates for that year drop to 1 every 60~ days. That's still pretty bad, I suppose, but the improvement was huge. Then the parent company Schlumberger decides that they want to micro-manage their operations; 'Dowell' gets dropped as a name, the trucks are repainted white, and Jesus, that nap policy had to go! What, was the company just full of lazy bums? Just fire everybody that can't handle the work!
Sure enough, they go back to 1 incident every 15~ days, no matter how many 'bums' they fire.
Safety first!
One person honestly answered 40 hours.
Forty hours.
but he was 100% drug free
I wonder how that's gonna play out over time with (US) society's growing acceptance of smoking pot.
He was a great employee. Always responsible, always on time, worked 50 hours a week without ever making a mistake or failing in any of his responsibilities and he was a really nice guy on top of all of that. I was actually happy this other place could pay him better.
They fired him after one week because of random drug testing.
Told him that he showed 'possible traces of pot'. OH NO!
So he's back with us again, and it really is their loss.
Most companies drug test for the insurance discount.
The safest and best companies bake safety into their culture and hire responsible people, as there's no "responsible person" test and you have to fully commit to making things safe. Drug tests are often a way for a company to have an out when really it's the company's fault for having shitty management and culture.
Good companies don't care AND get bigger discounts because their accident rates are so low.
I've had a work day(s?) like that before, not 40 hours though. It was about 24 hours, but it was very physically-demanding labor. Field work. Pounding stakes, wrapping huge cables, hauling heavy things from point A to point B, few short breaks.
Luckily it was just a one-time thing, but by the end of it I was making stupid mistakes, like forgetting to tell our survey equipment that there were cables attached to it. I would certainly have been in less danger if I had just toked up and worked a regular 8-hour day.
After getting chewed out by my wife, I have very strict work hour limits and I take full breaks. I've never been intoxicated on the job before, but I've been exhausted and that shit's not worth it. If you have a project going on that needs 16+ hours of consecutive labor, hire another person temporarily to do the work in shifts.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Because it is absolutely critical to our society that TVs make it on the shelves in time for black friday.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
:winky:
What is totally shitty is that the company has the right to fire you if you test positive THC (which we don't carry) when they're testing you for the substances we administer. This happened to someone I worked with, and it not only cost her job, but her license as well.
It feels like they are trying to see if you are desperate for money or something. It is creepy.
I get to go to a lot of different customers factories in my job, and the guy I was working took a nail in his foot. The next day, the big, 'no accidents in X days' banner was still up in the 60s, because they had some sort of incentive going, and so if at all possible didn't report accidents.
Meanwhile, another one incentivized reporting accidents, using some kind of lottery system where you got something in a monthly drawing of names for everyone who'd submitted a report.
No cookie for guessing which method actually created a safer working environment.
Several states - mostly on the West Coast - have made this illegal. Apparently, it has had the perverse effect of rendering people who got hit really hard in '08 permanently unemployable. California, especially, had a huge problem with this.
I want that no cookie, so I'll guess the factory that had the guy put a nail in his foot. That had to be the safer place.
there are a bunch of easy exceptions in the California law so it didn't really help the workers who needed it most
I'm not opposed to the law, don't get me wrong. I think it's a good law. But some of the exceptions are too broad.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
That's appalling!
Yep. See if you have shitty credit it means you are not good at managing your life, have priorities that will make you a poor employee, or are unlucky.
Why would someone want to employ that?
Look, we said it was gonna trickle down.
We didn't say how far it was gonna trickle down.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Or you know, drowns anyone shackled to the bottom
heavy marijuana users can piss dirty for a looooong time after they quit smoking, dude
i know this because of reasons.
Full disclosure: my job requires me to finish at 11PM and report for another shift the next day at 6:30 AM. No I am not able to successfully sleep between shifts.
There's a big problem in Australia with police moonlighting at other jobs. The scheduling gives them something like 3 on 2 off per week for exactly the reason that they work weird hours in a dangerous and important job, but the problem is a lot of cops pick up extra work on the side (shift work is about the only thing available) so they don't really get the proper recuperation time (arguably it's a lot worse for them).
The solution is to both pass laws and make it extremely easy for employees and anyone effected to sue for heavy damages if an employer violates them.
Why are you guys so anti-business?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Because businesses are anti-worker quality of life?
I was, but that's the reasoning behind why legislation will be so difficult to pass.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
What should happen is that jobs need to pass stringent criteria to be able to do this kind of thing
Doc: That's right, twenty five years into the future. I've always dreamed on seeing the future, looking beyond my years, seeing the progress of mankind. I'll also be able to see who wins the next twenty-five world series.
Such as? I imagine that any job that requires people to stay on duty for 26-hours straight either doesn't need to be done well, has a high tolerance for fuck-ups and worker death or could actually function better with an extra shift.
Firefighters (that I know, anyway) work 24 hour shifts. I think they go one day on two days off.