More employers expected to ban the smoke break

Smokers must have thought that being ostracised from the office and forced to huddle like vagrants on street corners was the last humiliation. But no.

Employers are increasingly fed up with the lack of productivity that smokers exhibit as they go outside for their regular smoke. In fact, some employers are introducing new rules to either ban smoking during office hours or make it too difficult for staff to bother.

A poll of 2,500 adults in Britain by researcher Onepoll.com found that smokers on average took four 15 minute breaks daily or 240 hours each year.

Lawyer Peter Vitalie says he is commonly asked what to do about the employee who takes regular breaks for a smoke. He says that increasingly employers will not tolerate the employee who ducks out for a smoke break.

“You only have to look at what property managers are doing, putting smokers in smaller and smaller corners,” he says.

And he says, as employers clamp down, smokers should not expect much support. “No one questioned employers rights to limit smoking to tea room and then to ban it in the office. The next logical step is to ban smoking in work hours.”

The AFR reported today that Hicksons Lawyers HR department is asking staff to sign contracts stating that they will not smoke in work hours and that the Health Department in Canberra has told staff they cannot smoke outside break times.

Vitalie says employees should expect to be asked more questions about their smoke habits when they go to job interviews. “There is nothing stoping an employer asking a candidate if they smoke and how often,” he says.

He says it is also lawful and reasonable to expect that employees are at their desks working and not out on the street. “You can put into a contract that staff are not to smoke during office hours. You can also fix the time of people’s breaks and request that in their break they do not leave your premises.”

He also said that if morning is a busy period you can request that the employee does not have a break.
“There is no law that says you can’t discriminate against smokers,” he says.

And employees who take a break every half hour or so for a smoke will find employers increasingly less tolerant of the habit.

“An employer is fully entitled to sit them down and tell them that taking breaks is not productive and that if they don’t stick to new rules they will be subject to disciplinary procedures.”

But while employers may well start to grill new staff about their smoking habits, expect the tables to be turned. Those die hard addicts may well prefer to work in a workplace where smoking is tolerated and could well ask of their boss: “Do you smoke?”