The following is from an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:
The best way to hire productive employees is to look for people with qualifications, talent, honesty and commitment. Now, however, a small but growing number of employers are looking for something else as well: job applicants who don't smoke.
As much as we despair of the death and damage caused by tobacco, this new employment criterion strikes us as a lamentable and unwarranted intrusion into applicants' private lives — and one that should worry anyone in this country who has an elevated risk for any sort of injury or illness. In other words, most of us.
The University of Pennsylvania Health System is the latest employer to adopt these ill-considered new rules. It will reject any job-seeker who admits to having been a smoker within the previous six months. The university's health system justifies the new no-smokers policy on the grounds that it will have a healthier workforce and lowered health benefit costs.
It's one thing to ask people to bear more of the cost of their preventable illness by paying higher premiums, but to deprive them of the chance at a livelihood because they engage in perfectly legal behavior is outrageous. It's unclear whether such policies would actually save employers money.
Smokers do have increased health risks, but are they a worse risk than people who text while driving or who don't wear seat belts?
And if the goal is indeed simple economics and improved health, the slope toward ridiculous employment biases is so slippery it might as well be coated with trans fats.
Employers shouldn't be making moral judgments about one health risk vs. another. The best workers are chosen on the basis of the work they do, not their bad health habits.