It is always funny how the loudest of the civil libertarians always want rights for themselves without the ability for others to have the same sorts of rights…

I could care less about what someone does in the privacy of their own home, but I should be able to check up on anyone I want to employee and if contractually they agree to get piss tested, then if someone is making a device purely to bypass these things, they should be busted.

Fail.

The person making the device has not contractually interacted with you in any way. The employees, maybe so, but the makers of the device broke no contract.

Your wants of employment have no bearing on the rights of other to make stuff. A fake penis is not illegal, see the very large adult-toy industry.

@Hollywoodbob: “No employer has any right to dictate what you do when you’re off the clock. When and only when you are working should your employer be able to control your behavior and activities.”

Wrong. You have the absolute right to do what you want (assuming it’s legal), and to take the consequences. If you want to behave badly (defined any way your emmployer chooses), you have that right. And they have the right to fire your silly a**.

It isn’t smart for companies to fire people for dumb reasons, and most don’t. Partly because it’s bad business, and partly because it’s bad humanity. And, contrary to popular belief, most companies are run by people. But if you consistently do stuff on your own time that can negatively impact your employer’s business… they’ll let you go.

One great example… Many years ago I knew a guy who was unhappy with certain aspects of his gig. He went back to a college reunion and was bad mouthing the company left and right during various home coming events. One of the people he yapped at was a recruiter who did some work for the company. He actually identified himself and told this guy, “You may want to cut down on the negative chatter. Your company does a lot of recruiting here on campus.”

His response? “Screw them. If they can’t keep their people happy, these kids deserve to know about it.”

When it got back to his boss, they put him on notice. When he did it again, they fired him.

You have every legal right to brutally disrespect your employer in public. And they have every legal right to shift your compalints into the “disgruntled former employee” column.

I’m not arguing one way or another, but employee drug tests are far from the only application for something like this, so the suit may have actually originated in something a little more meaningful than someone wanting to smoke a little pot in his spare time while working at some office job.

I have a friend who went to a concert and smoked some opium, which he does not normally do… he was bummed out because his father had died. No one was harmed at the time. My friend got drug-tested three days later, though, without warning as part of a new policy implementation, and lost his job. At no point did he do anything wrong while working, and at no point did he fail to do his job, and his management begged for him to be able to attend rehab instead of being fired, but no-go; opiate users are not eligible for rehab in their policy, just alcoholics and potheads.

I suppose it’s great to be part of a privileged aristocracy that gets to do what other people are punished for… but I’m not looking forward to being the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.

We used to have a simpler test before we arbitrarily oppressed people without regard for their abilities… instead of checking your blood for chemicals, we’d look at your skin and see if it contained too much melanin.

I should be able to check up on anyone I want to employee and if contractually they agree to get piss tested, then if someone is making a device purely to bypass these things, they should be busted.

For what, exactly? The manufacturer is not party to any contract with you.

People will just say that I’m a feckless whiner, no doubt. What is surrendering your urine after all against all of the other serial injustices that the modern worker has been conditioned to accept? This is what you must think because you are powerless. What you cannot prevent you must accept, so I am a whiner. All the nonsense about public safety makes a great deal of sense even though no one knows what the evidence is to support this.

Someone smart reader of this post may say, “Yes there is evidence, and here it is!” Are you also factoring in the monumental cost of the program itself though? That is, all of the money used to implement and enforce the urine testing industry could also be regarded as a drain on resources that could otherwise go to boost corporate productivity, or even save lives.

How many lives are saved every year by drug testing? How much is productivity improved? Who are the sources for this information? We just accept this unquestioningly.

If we are to assume that there is something to the public safety argument, in order to preserve our rights, let’s make all drugs legal. Since their usage is presumed to cost lives, whenever they are purchased, a certain amount of the price should go to what I may term an altered state off-set. That is, the lives that you may endanger in the first world can be counterbalanced by dis-imperiling a life in the third world at a much reduced cost, by the way.

This is already accepted practice, by the way in the polluting energy business.

The State nor its corporate proxies should have any claim to your body. All bodily fluids should be as inviolable as your arm, your brain, or your fetus.

Where exactly do our rights begin? What if there were a popular drug that could only be traced in one’s spinal fluid. Under the pretext of public safety should we also so willingly grant access to this bodily fluid?

What about the fact that alcohol is not easily detected (unless the person has been very recently been drinking?). IN the interest of public safety shouldn’t we also ban alcohol? Why does it deserve such a place of privilege?

I could go on, slave.

Corporations have any number of accountabilities – to their employees, customers, board of directors, stockholders, and so forth. They should be free to take reasonable precautions. It strikes me as hysterical to say that screening people for illegal drug usage is unreasonable.

For one thing, it’s not a binary system. If someone’s positive for pot, the company might choose to ignore them. For another thing, it’s not an argument to say that corporations can’t control for factors like mental defect or laziness. They do – that’s what performance appraisals and such are for – but that’s not even the point.

The point is that if there’s a clear warning sign that an employee might behave in a way that’s a threat to the corporation, it would be imprudent to not act on that sign. Illegal drugs are such a sign. It’s up to the corporation to respond reasonably to it.

A: The fake penis was available in only one color, and that color was a bit too long to be real :-)

You said “illegal things”. Are they vetted for propensity to do illegal things?

That’s a lot of ground.

Not everyone can choose their employer. And who says the illegality of a drug is an indicator of threat to the corporation? Is alcohol any different? (the answer is no).

Require businesses that drug test staff to have complete health and rehabilitation programs for staff. Watch them fall over themselves running away from that.

Drug tests are more proof workers are seen as machines,property, serfs, animals, chattels. Stand up for your personal dignity, rights and freedoms.

So how do you describe the effects of Prozac? That’s just a naive sweeping generalisation, and Big Pharma says you’re wrong.

The entity that you call “I” is a stream of sensory input filtered through an intricately complex web of assumptions and beliefs that are so rigidly and fundamentally part of your being they are invisible. Some of us choose to seek an understanding beyond this veneer, and some illegal drugs are among the tools of choice.

I don’t want the pilot on my 747 doing crack, and I sure as hell don’t encourage drug use, but it is not intrinsically immoral and stupid either.

Without getting into specifics, I work a fairly high-clearance job that I feel very lucky to have got right at this moment in history. (From what I’ve been told, they did not lay off anyone from my division during the Great Depression, & those few they did lay off during the ’70′s recession were rehired once it ended.) But even if external economic forces didn’t dictate that I should try to keep my job, the job itself is self evident as one which ought not be made any more difficult by intoxication of any sort while on the clock.

Once out of that environment, off the payroll and not serving as a representative of my employer in any way, there is not a goddamn thing about my lifestyle they have any affair in, be it illegal or not, short of arrest. Thankfully, my employer does not piss test, which is amusing since I once needed to piss test for a copy editing job.

Certainly, under current law as it is enforced or not, any employer has the right to do so, but only because any employee who refuses is seen as tacitly admitting to wrongdoing; it’s the corporate equivalent of that Bush-era value, “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” What is less commonly understood is that this is an overt violation of the 5th Amendment; short of a subpoena, which would require evidence to be evaluated by a judge, a hassle even when there is just cause, there’s no legal way to compel the body’s testimony, which makes these “piss or walk” threats BLACKMAIL. So who is the bigger criminal: the employee who might toke a bit after work or the employer who circumvents constitutional law?

Piss-test the CEO! Any executive that refuses public urine testing is obviously acting in bad faith.

The clue is in the name: Human RESOURCES

We are not resources, we are people.

In the US, “If you want the job you have to have sex with me” is quid-pro-quo sexual harassment and is illegal.

@Anonymous. I get migraines, too, btw. But the argument that recreational (or anti-existential angst) drug use should be treated the same as the use of legal medication falls flat with me. As does the comparison of anti-drug policies and racism.

You’re conflating inertia with ethics. Your argument is that existing law is intrinsically correct by virtue of the fact that it exists now.

Clif Marsiglio @14:

It is always funny how the loudest of the civil libertarians always want rights for themselves without the ability for others to have the same sorts of rights.

“I pay you to do certain work for me, during certain hours, to a certain standard of quality.” That’s the employer’s side of it. I don’t see how that means they’ve bought my off-hours. Do you want to explain how continuing to own something I haven’t sold amounts to claiming a right I don’t grant to others?

… the employer should be able make any rule that they find is appropriate for there setting.

No kidding? I see you’ve never been required to wear nylons, high heels, and makeup to a non-public-contact job.

I object to laws giving employers these inappropriate rights because I know about some of the things employers have historically required of their employees. I take it you’d have no objection if the terms of your employement required you to attend church, or forbade you to attend political meetings or lectures, or stipulated who your family members could and couldn’t work for, or required you to get your employer’s permission to get married?

JFlex @23:

I would take the responsibility to find a corporation that fit my lifestyle.

I take it you live in an area, and work in an industry, where it’s easy to change jobs.

Here’s a question for you: how do you figure that “Do you put out” or “Are you desperate for this job” are things it’s inappropriate for you to know about an employee, but “What do you do in your off-hours” is? You say that as though the distinction is self-evident, but it’s not evident to me, or to a lot of other people in this conversation. So: where’s the line, and why is it drawn there?

By the way: you list “health” as a subject that’s inappropriate for you to know. If someone tests positive for barbiturates or benzodiazepines, does that mean they like to get stoned on downers, or are they managing anxiety or a seizure disorder? Your test can’t tell the difference. The only way to find out is to ask them for information they ought not have to give.

I wouldn’t dream of asking a potential employee to give me a urine sample unless the job required them to be on-call 24 hours a day, operating heavy machinery or making split-second decisions, or unless they were doing something like solo long-distance trucking, where I could neither see them work nor evaluate their minute-to-minute performance. But you know, most jobs aren’t like that.

I laughed when License Farm @87 mentioned having to take a piss test for a job as a copyeditor. I’ve employed lots of copyeditors. The only relevant piss test in their case is whether they can refrain from pissing on very bad manuscripts. Given a choice between a copyeditor who thinks The Elements of Style is an authoritative book on style but who tests clean for drug use, and one who can distinguish between the first and second editions of Fowler but tests positive for THC, I’d take the latter in a split second. (In fact, I did take the latter. He was great.)

I can give you one theoretical reason and several practical reasons why I think it’s a bad idea. Here’s the theoretical reason, applicable to all: their off-hours don’t belong to me. I’m not paying for that time, so I don’t own it. I’m also not paying for their private lives. All I’ve got a claim on is the work they do during office hours. If what they’re doing in their off-hours is affecting their performance, that is my concern; but what concerns me is that something’s affecting their work, not what’s causing it. (Unless it’s some privileged thing like illness or having a baby, of course.)

Sure, I’ve seen employees who turn up in impaired condition often enough for it to affect their overall work. Most often, it was because they were habitually not getting enough sleep. That can be caused by partying too hard too often, but it can also be caused by taking on outside freelancing, or putting in way too many hours organizing their parish’s open-air weekend retreats, or by disorderly habits plus a mulish refusal to admit that they’re no longer nineteen and can’t pull all-nighters whenever they feel like it. The point isn’t what causes it. The point is that they’re letting their off-hours activities affect their job performance.

In the meantime, an employee whose drug use is hitting troublesome levels is going to have plenty of other problems in their life. If someone is working for me, I’m not going to need a drug test to tell me they’re spiraling down into chaos. I’d lots rather have a test that warns me that they’ve become a problem gambler.

As Antinous says, there’s no such thing as the perfect hire. I’ll add that there’s no such thing as a trouble-free employee, whether freelance or in-house. They all require handholding and tinkering and lots of attention.

So here’s the completely non-theoretical reason I don’t like drug testing: I’ve seen lots of hirings and some firings, and a lot of work getting done in between. Testing people’s urine for drugs might have precluded some great hires, but it wouldn’t have done a thing to protect us from the real headaches and problem cases.

As I said earlier, I’d much rather have a test that would tell me that someone’s got a gambling problem. While I’m wishing, I’d also like a test that would tell me whether an applicant is a Borderline Personality Disorder case, how habitual it is for them to tell the truth, what strategies they use for conflict resolution, how they characteristically screw up (and what their favorite excuses are when they do it), how much thinking they do about the work patterns of people whose jobs touch on theirs, and whether they automatically assume it’s someone else’s responsibility to help tidy up the shared conference room after meetings.

Come to think of it, wouldn’t we all?

Heh heh, yeah exactly. In fact I’d be a little concerned if the pilot was on Prozac.

The documented cases of commerical airline pilots flying while under alcohol intoxication begs the question: Are these drug testing regimes really protecting the general public? Or are they just keeping the cube farms fearful and productive.

@Arkizzle. Many jobs require a basic background check and education check as well as the drug screen. You come up positive on the crime thing, and you may have a chance at entry-level, but not a management position.

I’m not sure what your point is, though. Are you saying that if everyone should undergo drug testing in order to show adherence to drug laws, upper management should undergo ______ testing to show adherence to ___________ laws? Testing positive for illegal drugs proves you’ve broken the law, even if you haven’t been to court, tried, etc. If you can think of a test that employers could give to see if possible management hirees cheat on their taxes, beat their kids, engage in insider trading, etc… I think you could make a mint.