Last week a scary story appeared in both Boston daily newspapers, concerning the plight of a 30-year-old man, Scott Rodrigues, who was fired from a gardening company because he smokes cigarettes. Rodrigues has subsequently sued his former employer, and, considering the nanny-state culture that’s cheapened the quality of life in the United States today, he’ll probably lose.
First, the comical aspect, something that’s irrelevant to the case but illustrates the vast gulf between elite broadsheets and tabloids. The Boston Globe’s lead sentence reads: “A Buzzards Bay man has sued The Scotts Co., the lawn care giant, for firing him after a drug test showed nicotine in his urine, indicating that he had violated a company policy forbidding employees to smoke on or off the job.”
On the same day, Nov. 30, The Boston Herald was more direct: “A Buzzards Bay man peed into a cup and lost his job when the Scott Co. discovered he’d been inhaling more than the chemicals he sprayed on lawns—he was allegedly smoking cigarettes—according to a lawsuit he filed.”
The Herald did muff the name of the defendant in the suit—it’s Scotts, not “Scott”—but in an era when journalists and editors working for what are considered the “upmarket” publications regularly, and condescendingly, refer to “ordinary Americans” in just about any kind of article, the Herald’s no-nonsense prose is something to admire.
Anyway, the gist of the battle between Scotts and Rodrigues is that the latter violated the company’s draconian rule that all workers must be non-smokers, period, even if they don’t light up while on duty. It’s an insurance issue, of course, since the premiums Scotts forks over each month are higher for people categorized as health risks.
A spokesman for the company, Jim King, told the Globe: “We’re not interested in dictating our employees’ behavior in their free time because it doesn’t affect us, but the issue of smoking we deem different because there is no dispute whatsoever that there’s a direct correlation between increased health risk and healthcare costs. So what we’re really saying is we’re not willing to underwrite the risks associated with smoking.”
Sounds like doublespeak to me, especially as the Herald included the nugget that King himself smokes “a ‘handful’ of cigars each year” and that the “firm is flexible with staff who live with smokers or may themselves have the occasional smoke, be it a cigar or cigarette.” No mention about the “occasional” joint, but one wonders if King, a vice president of communications at Scotts, submits to “peeing into a cup” as regularly—or even at all—as the workers. After all, a “handful” of cigars is a pretty vague description.
What’s next for Scotts, if it’s successful in beating Rodrigues in the upcoming litigation, and scores of private companies across the country? Consumption of alcohol immediately comes to mind, since a heavy drinker is arguably a far greater health risk than a pack-a-day smoker, like Rodrigues, than a person who uses nicotine products. Then there’s obesity—which, according to a Dec. 1 New York Times editorial has become a “health emergency” among the young—and how Scotts or other firms might predict the higher insurance costs for employees who eat too many double-patty burgers.
Will the colleagues of Rodrigues soon be required to undergo not only urine tests but also step on a scale once a week?
What about a young fellow, whose latest physical gives him a medical thumbs-up, but whose family has a history of premature heart trouble? Or someone who’s been cited by cops for exceeding the speed limit while driving? Couldn’t that be an indication of a risky employee who might crash a car and wind up in a hospital for two months incurring enormous costs? Say a woman applies to Scotts—again, using this company as an example—and it’s revealed that she once had ovarian or skin cancer but the illness is in complete remission: Odds are that her application will hit the garbage can before an issue can even arise.
Meanwhile, as The New York Sun reported on Dec. 1, Michael Bloomberg is set to appoint a “food tsar” for the city, someone who’ll be responsible for citizens making responsible eating choices. The Sun’s Andrew Wolf, who succinctly sums up the opposition to the mayor’s pernicious policy of paternalism, provides readers with a funny bit about what he predicts will be the inevitable ban of foie gras in New York.
He writes: “Raising animals for food has never been a pretty industry, and to those who equate the lives of animals with those of humans, it is something that must be ended on moral grounds. But ducks are not people. Maybe we should blame the late Mel Blanc. Could it be that the anti-meat activists have watched too many cartoons that give animals human voices and personalities?
“Foie gras is a convenient target to use to open the door to a total ban on the production of meat and poultry. Foie gras is an expensive product that few of us indulge in. The message is that rich folks are torturing ducks for the production of an expensive vanity treat. This mixing of class warfare by the animal rights movement is deliberate and was previously used in the campaign against fur.”
All of which makes the chatter about Bloomberg running for president in 2008—as a self-financed third-party candidate who won’t appear as nuts as Ross Perot—rather unsettling. On the plus side, should the mayor wage a battle with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John McCain or (God help us) Mitt Romney, for example, he’d pull more votes from the Democrat nominee than the Republican. The real danger is that Bloomberg, willing to spend a record amount of money on a quixotic crusade, would spread the gospel that the government needs to educate—and legislate—Americans about their destructive habits.
The Times, in a sniffy Nov. 28 editorial objecting to stores opening for business on Thanksgiving, reflects the warped Bloomberg ideology: “Shoppers behaving badly is an old story,” the writer says. “Offer a limited supply of deeply-discounted goods and people will wrestle over them, whether wedding gowns, refrigerators or Elmo dolls. But shopping on Thanksgiving is something new and sinister.”
The rubes! You’d think a newspaper that constantly harps on the Bush administration screwing, once again, “ordinary people” in favor of the fabulously wealthy might have sympathy for those who want to save a buck or two by patronizing a store like Wal-Mart or CompUSA. But consistency at The Times is an attribute that disappeared a long time ago, way before soda was referred to as a “sugary drink” that’s ravaging future generations.
