"I believe private businesses should have the power to determine their own hiring practices"
In that case I want to have the power to determine my own job acceptance practices. I want my hiring manager to take a drug test too. After all, I don't wanna end up working for a drug edict.
The asymmetry of employer/employee relationship is just astonishing.
I once had a midsized startup doing something very similar to my small startup try and recruit me aggressively, they sent an NDA to sign and said i couldn’t even speak to interviewers until I did. (Consider how dangerous this is given the similar products.)
I told them I’d sign the NDA if all my interviewers also signed one from me, nice way to end the discussion.
My point is, if there is something you don’t like and it isn’t common, a way to decline is to decline the job. If it is a widespread practice, and unfair, then we need legislation.
> After all, I don't wanna end up working for a drug edict.
I know it's a tongue-in-cheek comment, but this is part of the stigma needs to end too. If they wanted to have a toke with some friends at a bucks night the week before or some such, and then have it detected on a test, that doesn't really mean they're a drug addict...
Depends on which definition of addiction you adhere to. In medicine, there is substance misuse vs substance abuse, and the line between them has to do with negative impacts in life that are results from the substance use. So, drug addict itself is not the best term, as one might use that to describe a daily user of caffeine or alcohol and yet they are seemingly unhindered by their habit, though they may be technically addicted due to near 100% consistent use.
Caffeine and alcohol daily gives you physical withdraw systems. A better comparison would be video games or movies/TV and MJ. You can get emotionally addicted and opt to play video games or smoke instead of doing productive things, but if you walk away from either you aren't going to get a splitting migraine and crushing fatigue like quitting coffee cold turkey.
Astonishing? They own the means of production, you are the means of production.
But let me give you an example of how these sort of laws have severe unintended consequences:
In some states it is illegal to ask a potential hire if they have a felony. The reasoning was that this would force employers to be less discriminatory. The result? More discrimination of black people and lower wages. Why, you might ask? Because the less information you have as an employer, the more you are going to rely on the information you do have: what the applicant looks like, how they act, etc. Also the wages are lower becauase you have to price in the risk of them being a felon.
Employers should be able to choose whoever they think is best through whatever metrics they want. After all, it’s their business, and hiring and firing who you want is absolutely integral to freedom and free markets. And laws imposed by the government just make things worse, and more discriminatory.
Let’s say a teenage boy who looks like a stoner wants a job at WalMart. He’s not a stoner though, he just has long hair or whatever. If WalMart could have made him pee in a cup, they would have hired a dependable and honest employee. But because they can’t, they judge him on his hair and don’t give him the job.
If you're hiring for a $10 job you get what you pay for.
This is the asymmetry the OP of this thread is talking about. Employers want to screw the applicant on wages, paying him market value for his "specifications" rather than paying what the job is worth to the company.
Did you expect gentlemen and scholars to apply for warehouse jobs at Wal-Mart? Do you really think it's right to practically push your job positions to halfway houses and then discriminate against felons?
One man's wasteful spending is another man's prosperity. You get what you pay for.
"I believe private businesses should have the power to determine their own hiring practices"
Like only hiring whites, or blacks, or Christians, or felons, or gays, or people who went to Harvard? Really, the government doesn't regulate this kind of thing at all. Companies can do whatever they want.
They occasionally do, but it’s not really worth it. Companies have different needs and it would be pretty absurd if the government was trying to ensure that there was ethnic diversity in, say, a stereotypical hip hop music video.
Well of course it's asymmetric. It's a transaction with money flowing in exactly one direction. You are of course free to not take the job on your end.
I actually like the NYC law and think it is reasonable regulation, but your argument makes no sense (imo).
If the employer is not totally screwing the employee over, hopefully there's a near equivalance of labor for money. Human labor is one of the most valuable products, so yes money may be flowing in one direction, but value is flowing in both.
> "I believe private businesses should have the power to determine their own hiring practices"
So... how about skin color^W^W culture fit test?
Or, perhaps there's some hidden classifiers that out protected statuses that can be used in AI/ML interviewing black boxes? By the time someone sues, the ML logic will have mutated with more input thus invalidating the previous decisions.
Acting roles are an example an exception from EEO laws because the job requires it. It's not illegal to discriminate on the basis of a protected class (age, sex, color, nationality etc) if it's a genuine requirement for the job. And if the employer claims a protected class attribute is a "genuine requirement" when it really isn't, you can be sure they'll have to go to court to defend it.
An exceptional case isn't applicable to most jobs in the world.
Bullseye - I was going to say the same thing. The imbalance and asymetry of information and investment is a huge problem.
Companies want information from you that they won't share. They have economies of scale with many employees, yet employees have one source of income. Employees might relocate while the company just readies a desk.
I would say that a company that wants a drug test should give me the results from the management chain as well as HR.
> I want my hiring manager to take a drug test too.
You can choose to work in an organization that has strict testing policies, including the hiring managers. Or you can ask your recruiter to take a test. I'll admit its a weird request, but considering the commissions on finding an employee are so high (1 to 2 months annual salary) and tight labor market, I wouldn't be surprised if they did it. I would take a drug test for much less. I don't see the asymmetry here.
That's not really asymmetrical, in the same way that e.g. wage information is. You can refuse to take their test (and not be hired) the same way they can refuse to take your test (and you refuse to work for them).
That being said, I believe that weed usage not being comparable to alcohol usage outside of the workplace doesn't make sense. I think it only makes sense to test for harder drugs e.g. opiates and amphetamines.
> You can refuse to take their test (and not be hired)
In idealistic world where everybody has the same leverage - perhaps. In real world refusing a job is a luxury most cannot afford. It is asymmetric precisely because negotiation positions are widely unequal.
The current unemployment rate is < 4%. We're nearing never before seen lows. And that record was set in 1950, when the total labor force (as a percent of the population) was much smaller since women generally did not need to work.
You're talking like being offered a job is some unique luxury. Maybe for extremely desirable jobs, but if a job is extremely desirable you generally just precluded the possibility of the employer being some dysfunctional drug addict - which makes your argument a nonstarter.
So many companies in so many industries are just starving for good employees.
I dunno, I think you're more likely to find drug addict "employers" in some of the most sought-after businesses -- movies, music, fashion, sports -- compared to normal, boring jobs...
Hahah, that's probably a pretty fair point! Though I suppose it gets back to the same point though that even if you do find out that your e.g. sports manager is a dysfunctional coke head, you're probably not going to be pass up a fat contract to do something you love.
Knowing of plenty of places where absolutely nobody has to take drug tests to get hired, I fail to follow the line of reasoning that it makes sense at all. Could you elaborate?
It makes perfect sense for pharmacists, nurses, doctors, and others who are have to work with drugs. It would be awful to have them stealing from patients.
It is also a generic test, kind of like a credit check, to avoid general mayhem. Things are correlated.
Nothing else stays in your system nearly as long as marijuana metabolites. Testing is only going to catch really frequent users, and what, you don't think you're not going to notice if that makes them unable to do their job?
You would be surprised at the high quality code being made by experienced/daily pot smokers. Not to be confused with someone smoking for the first time sitting outside passed out after the first hit.
Ah, to be clear my earlier comment was focused on regular non-marijuana drug users (i.e., daily coke or opiate or amphetamine use). Either it affects their work performance (negatively), or it doesn't, but the urine doesn't tell you that — their work output does. Ditto marijuana and alcohol.
I work in finance a good number of people are popping pills and doing lines in the bathroom all day long. It’s a little rarer, but a not insignificant group of people are doing heroin as well.
I used to be addicted to the stuff and ended up starting becauase an analyst gave me some when we were working on a model late at night.
Cocaine has negligible withdrawal symptoms especially when compared to benzodiazepines or alcohol, so this is absolutely not the case.
The literature that I have read does not say that any compounds are "hard" or "soft"
The literature that I have read also has noted that the impact of alcohol and tobacco are worse than the drugs people always refer to as "hard" drugs.
I'm one of tech leads for a company that doesn't really deal with anything that sensitive but routinely drug tests, I'm convinced it's just a way to get rid of employees they don't want. I have failed the drug tests 5 out of 5 times with substances significantly more frowned upon than cannabis and have yet to receive anything more than a chuckle when being handed the results while at the same time I've seen multiple others fired on their first offence. Go figure.
Have you been offered any help based on the results? Not saying that you are in need of it, but if you fail drug tests for work it seems reasonable enough to suspect abuse/addiction.
No, I believe they don't want to be seen to be acknowledging the clear difference in treatment. And there is little doubt I am an addict, I'm just able to keep it under control to where it doesn't affect my work or relationships.
Not from the U.S (assuming you are) and don't know how it's employed exactly, but don't most states there already have at-will employment where they can get rid of people for no/very little reason anyway?
They can get rid of people for any reason, not for no reason.
In real life things are even more complex: in case of a bitter divorce an employer will have some trouble trying to convince a judge that they fired a programmer because he didn't like classical music. And then programmer's attorney will present his version of events with some racial twist added...
Yes and no. In theory, they don't need a reason. In practice, they're concerned about lawsuits, politics, and unemployment insurance.
First of all, if you sue (and you can for a number of reasons), that means litigation, even if frivolous. Secondly, most orgs don't like giving person(s) the power to fire for no reason (politics / abuse potential). Finally, unemployment insurance is a big cost; if you get "fired for cause" their rates don't go up (this systems a joke, but that's a story for another day)
So, contrary to what you might think, and people will claim on the internet, it can practically be quite hard to fire someone. You just can't sue because you got fired fired for no reason, just for other stuff (eg. discrimination)
Assuming there is some correlation between illegal substance use/abuse, the test could be used to identify people with underlying issues that affect their work. No one really cares about your personal life, just use that as a proxy for your ability and risk mitigation. If it doesn't affect your work and you are a strong performer, the test results are not enforced. I think this is a reasonable response.
This is 100% the reason why drug testing in the workplace exists. There is no other reason other than safety for heavy equipment users. If you don't work in a dangerous place drug testing is punitive.
Depends on the industry and the class of job. In software and white collar work in general it’s almost unheard of. Go farther down the class scale and it becomes very common.
If your job requires a security clearance... random testing is a real thing. Same with the medical industry.
If you work in a safety critical, or security critical role, then there is randomized testing as well as pre-employment testing. This can be especially frustrating if you work as a contractor in those industries...
A lot of our issues stem from our (mostly) Republican Party's "War on Drugs". I could give you a rundown, but the summary section from Wikipedia does a good job.
Typically if you drive or operate equipment you are tested regularly. Otherwise you only encounter pre employment tests and that's only found with entry level jobs. Anything above entry level, they are hiring for your past performance and don't care what you need to do during your free time to keep up your groove.
It's never happened to me (I'm in the UK) but I know people who have worked on big public-sector projects where they require that everyone working on it is subject to random drug tests. Network Rail was one example.
Few days back a lady reported on reddit that she stored clear pee in an off brand 5 hour energy bottle and put it her vagina before interview for maintaining temperature[1]. It apparently got struck and medical intervention was needed.
I guess she must have got the idea from people who have been successful earlier with such attempts, so perhaps the test security at jobs aren't fool-proof.
If I had to take a guess I'd say they have harder time aiming, relatively easy for a male to piss into a small pot, a woman is probably going to end up pissing all over her hand. Fun.
That’s not actually how it works. It’s perfectly possible for a woman to pee into those little cups without making a mess (I’m a woman and I’ve done it plenty of times at the doctors office).
Speaking of which, peeing into a cup for true medical purposes is not more demeaning to women than to men (except when doctors won’t believe you when you assure them that it would be a medical miracle for you to be pregnant, and they make you take a pregnancy test anyway, wtf). Drug tests are demeaning, period, but gender has nothing to do with it.
For those who aren’t too squeamish: the female urethra does not spray like a shower head just because it’s recessed. It runs like a faucet. We may not be able to easily control the direction of the flow, but it’s easy enough to locate the opening and determine the direction by peeing a bit and stopping, and then place the cup to catch the flow.
Because the procedures are different for men and women or just the principle of it? It's a common test for medical related issues, is it different for drug testing?
Operating machinery should probably be tested but if you are working an office job I don't see why it matters. If someone is impaired enough that it matters you will see it without a test.
The problem is differentiating current intoxication/high, which is obviously bad in most jobs from someone who had a joint Saturday night two weeks ago, which has no impact on there work.
I've gotten some great, productive work done while pretty up there. For me, it removes inertia and I just get straight into my work and stay in it until I've gotten enough done for the day. It was my secret weapon during finals week when I had to crank out term papers for classes I wasn't especially interested in.
It doesn't matter if your sensitive professional was intoxicated more than a day ago in his/her free time and is perfectly apt to operate machinery during work hours.
Given that cannabis is far less dangerous than alcohol, both to the person having cannabis and to those nearby them, I think it should be treated very differently indeed! Alcohol use is responsible for like 90,000 deaths per year in the USA and cannabis close to 0 (there may be some related car accidents, I don't know, but no direct deaths and far fewer related ones).
Cannabis should be far more acceptable to use in modern society than alcohol. Persons having cannabis are much less likely to cause violence than those with alcohol, and are much more likely to think calmly about ways to improve the world.
I can think of 1000s more reasons why cannabis should be treated differently than alcohol by our governments and societies!
It should definitely be treated as more benign than alcohol. Cannabis not only doesn't impair you as much as alcohol (e.g. balance and coordination), it's also much safer. The LD50 for alcohol is of the same order of magnitude as the amount you need to get blackout drunk. The LD50 for cannabis is orders of magnitude higher than the amount it takes to put you to bed.
The exception here is probably with edibles. It would be far easier to OD on marijuana by ingesting concentrated edibles than it would be to OD on alcohol by ingesting shots. The irony is that edibles are probably a safer way to ingest cannabis (e.g. compared to smoking the flowers) assuming you take a normal dose.
It really depends, but I feel less able to focus mentally with ANY weedover than DECENT hangover.
Can feel effects even 2 days after smoking, not that they matter much more developing. Gathering client requirements day after smoking is near impossible.
Not even sure why lethal dose matters here. Did you mean half life?
Edit: cannabis half life is anywhere from 1 to 10 days. Considering caffeine's 5-6 hours and fact people usually stay away from coffee after 3PM - it's very realistic to feel cannabis for days after use.
The LD50 is pretty important if we're evaluating the safety of the drug, especially if it's easy to ingest that amount.
> cannabis half life is anywhere from 1 to 10 days. Considering caffeine's 5-6 hours and fact people usually stay away from coffee after 3PM - it's very realistic to feel cannabis for days after use.
The duration of psycho-effects is not the same thing as the half-life. The half-life of cannabinoids is not too important, as the compounds are absorbed by fatty acids and released slowly over time into the body. The actual high for a typical dose lasts a few hours; you might feel groggy for about a day, maybe two if you're an infrequent user. As for your personal experience, I know people who can function normally in conversation on weed. Personally, I can't, but other things like driving and coordination tasks are no problem for me.
Downvote me to oblivion on this - I don't care. If you drive while high you are threatening the lives of others just for kicks. You don't want that blood on your conscience if something goes wrong. No your reaction times, focus, and judgement are not the same. They just aren't. I am not anti-marijuana by any stretch but there is a time and a place for it. Driving is not that time.
Have you ever driven without getting a full night's sleep? Wouldn't you consider that the same kind of offense since it reduces your reaction time and focus?
I'd like to see some data on the increased risks of driving while under the influence of marijuana before I lump it in with alcohol but saying that ANY reduction in focus or coordination means you are a threat to other drivers doesn't seem rational as long as you are still above a minimum threshold.
"Acute cannabis consumption nearly doubles the risk of a collision resulting in serious injury or death; this increase was most evident for studies of high quality, case-control studies, and studies of fatal collisions" - https://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e536
I don't hate weed. Quite the contrary! But the whole point of a smoke is to put you in a different place and that place is not conducive to the safety of those around you while steering two tons of metal at 70MPH. I'll take us off on a different and probably unpopular tangent - if you say that marijuana makes absolutely no difference to your baseline judgement, reflexes, focus, etc... then you might be hitting the pipe a bit too often (i.e., massive tolerance and habituation) and it's maybe time to consider scaling back.
This is your problem when you cannot use it responsibly. (E.g. dosage, some people are sensitive.)
The employer can always just fire you for being unable to perform job duties regardless of cannabis laws, if it is a repeat incident. They cannot just use cannabis use alone or drug test results to make an argument.
Interestingly enough, mildly drunk or hangover professional drivers routinely cause accidents which even sometimes kill people.
Yeah weed makes you pretty docile too, the only exception I've seen are people with proper mental issues (and those should stay away from any mind-altering stuff).
How many times have you seen drunken people get aggressive and start fights ie in bars, or do domestic violence? Stoners would just laugh hard and say something deeply incomprehensible to sober person
At least where I live - Spain - there are a good number of traffic accident deaths that test positive for cannabis [1]. Not as high as alcohol, but it's the number one illegal drug ahead of cocaine.
I suppose the differences in psychoactivity might be relevant. Alcohol has generally a predictable intoxication curve while as marijuana can have quite variable effects at a given dosage. Basically, I might argue that marijuana’s “safe” dose is harder to quantify. However, that being said, they should perhaps be treated equally and certainly ought to be a no factor when it comes to employment screening for non safety sensitive positions.
I think the main difference is in testing; alcohol disappears in days, cannabis in weeks-months.
If your question is, "can we trust Z to show up 20 days a month", an alcohol test might not be a bad one. If your candidate can't be sober for a pre-defined period of a few days, that might merit following up on.
But let's be honest, the laws requiring these tests are usually pork-barrel horseshit anyways.
The impairment is really just acting goofy more than anything, and if you are conscious of that fact you can put on sunglasses and non one would be any the wiser, as no random person will know how goofy you normally act. I'm not convinced it really affects reaction time significantly, based on my anectdata from gaming, playing sports, and going for runs.
Your comment is ambiguous here, but this ban is giving marijuana special treatment. It's completely legal to test your employees for e.g. alcohol use and refuse to hire them if they do use it. By taking away the ability to even test for marijuana, it gives marijuana use a special status.
There's a difference between these tests (has this person smoked weed at any point in the last month, roughly?) and breathalyzer tests (is this person currently drunk?)
Showing up to work drunk vs. showing up to work two weeks after smoking weed are relatively different scenarios, to say the least.
Hair tests for alcohol indicates average consumption over a period of months. It can also be detected using blood/urine tests over shorter periods of time, but similarly testing for usage rather than 'are you drunk right now' which hardly needs a test.
Only because thats usually how you end up with it in countries where its illegal. Common Joe doesn't have the skills and equipment to turn it to something non-harmful for consumption. I am amazed how quickly in US the oil vaping industry had developed, and how good the products are compared to old school consumption.
Compared to Netherland where this is cca legal for many years, and you can still only buy plants or cakes (which isn't ideal for quite a few reasons, ie hard to get right dosage first time). In fact, oil vaping cartridges are illegal there (no sense whatsoever, you can buy hashish which can be very potent).
I can guarantee you, tons of people who don't smoke cigarettes vastly prefer consumption with 0 carcinogens from burning the plant.
Thank you for pointing this out. We decided years ago that people shouldn't be involuntarily exposed to smoke, which is carcinogenic and psychoactive. People were fine with it for tobacco, because smoking isn't really "cool" any more. Now all the young, "cool" people want different rules so they can smoke whenever and wherever they want to.
This sounds like both a good and a bad thing. Of course if you’re going to be operating heavy machinery, or something where lives are at risk, you should not be on any drugs. But if you’re sitting as an office worker, or cashier at Diane Reed, I think drug testing is a waste of time
You can reduce the employer paid portion of health insurance premiums and then have the health insurance company reimburse the employees that share their health data, and then the employer reimburse the health insurance company for these rebates.
In my experience, you already get $20 to $40 per month for going to the gym a certain number of times or doing a certain number of steps per month.
That would be a workaround though, no? Ie, you're sharing this with an insurance company, not an employer.
What law(s) would this workaround be working around? Ie, would it be illegal to make sharing this data (regardless of insurance) a condition of employment. I don't mean specific that are covered by other laws (discrimination, medical privacy), just an arbitrary thing an employer might want to know/control about an employee's personal life.
Presumably, employers aren’t experts at knowing what results in lower healthcare costs, plus it would avoid health data from being shared with another entity unnecessarily. It would also be better PR since health insurance needs your health data anyway, so nothing is changing other than people paying less for being healthier.
It seems it is legal in the US. Most of the developed world forbids them.
In Switzerland there are some exceptions for people who may operate trains or buses, but even then, the test has to be performed by a doctor and the employer only gets told if the employee is able to perform the task or not.
I am a software engineer Massachusetts and I was tested when I interned at Intel in Hudson, MA, perhaps because I would be going to their factory on occasion. Never anywhere else, including at a defense company.
As an intern I wasn't really in a place to turn down a test, but letting a company examine my bodily fluids is pretty insane.
Depends on the industry. There's a lot more software jobs in non-software industries (defense, finance, etc) on the east coast so the proportion of developers tested is going to be higher.
The drug test is pretty flawed since the fat solubility of THC metabolites makes it stay in your body exponentially longer than harder drugs.
Not sure why downvotes, its a fact google it.
An example of this, the people who work fly-in-fly-out in the mining industry in Australia are routinely tested for drugs and alcohol, so if you've smoked pot up to three weeks before you could lose your job.
But, there's rampant amphetamine abuse in the industry among workers, because that metabolizes in a matter of hours-days as opposed to weeks. So the anti drug policy that bans workers from using cannabis on their time off has had the inverse effect of increasing harder substance abuse.
I don't know about THC, but I've been tested positively for Amphetamine before and didn't take it or any medication that is a structural derivate of it. This is a problem that is not very well known, even doctors rarely know how unreliable drug tests can be. Amphetamine-derivates for example have one of the highest percentage of false positives: ~15% -- a lot of molecules in your body have a structural similiarity with the metabolites of the substance.
If you are ever tested positively for an Amphetamine-like substance, and you know you didn't take it -- you should insist on a second test right there on the spot.
People test positive for all sorts of amphetamines because the test is a joke, overly broad, and unreliable to boot as you pointed out. Anyone who has asthma-related medication is a lock to fail, especially if they take pills like Bronkaid.
There are many types of drug tests. Rapid tests are not super reliable. Lab tests are. We call expert witnesses that do lab tests of urine samples as witnesses all the time... over a multi-decade career, one of our main lab supervisors has overseen the testing of 2 million+ UAs, and they have had one proven error that was due to faulty calibration of an instrument. I would love to see contrary evidence.
The problem is that you’re disqualifying people from jobs for the equivalent of being drunk up to 3 months ago, which is ridiculous. The other drugs that are tested had to have been consumed within the week, because their half-lives are much shorter.
I am definitely not contesting that the drug/work policy in the US is heinous - I fully agree. As long as a person is safely doing their job they should be free to recreate however they see fit. I just think urine analysis lab testing is far more accurate than many people believe it is. I have never even seen a rapid test be wrong once it was sent to a lab, and I have probably seen 200+ such confirmations.
Marijuana, methamphetamines, and heroine are the three we see the most of. Without a huge essay it is hard to explain which UAs get retested... but in my area of work all positive rapid tests are retested, regardless of if the person is contesting the validity of the UA. A rapid test is obviously a quick test; in my job it is an initial test done by probation officers for probationers. Since these are not “thorough” tests they are always lab tested if they are positive for any illicit substance. Then retested if someone contests the validity of the lab result.
And to clarify, I do not do any testing... I just call witnesses at hearings and trials and review way more UA results than I would like to.
That makes a lot of sense actually. The Methyl group attached to the amphetamine molecule prevents the liver from breaking it down as fast which is why it is more potent and longer lasting in your system. I'm also willing to bet that cocaine is relatively low compared to what one might expect because it's highly water soluble and rapidly degrades.
In that case I want to have the power to determine my own job acceptance practices. I want my hiring manager to take a drug test too. After all, I don't wanna end up working for a drug edict.
The asymmetry of employer/employee relationship is just astonishing.