Word: usgs
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...years. A number of corporations have moved to curb smoking in the workplace. For example, Chicago's Northern Trust Bank last month announced a ban on all smoking by its 4,500 employees except in lounges. It offered stop-smoking clinics to the 25% of its employees who indulge. USG Corp., also based in Chicago, has said that it would dismiss any employee of its acoustical-plants who smoked on the job or even at home, a move that critics contend treads on shaky legal ground. According to a poll of its members taken last fall by the Administrative Management...
Effective immediately, USG will not hire smokers at the acoustical-products plants. This week the company will begin giving periodic physicals and pulmonary-function exams, and a Smokenders program will be started for the third of its workers who smoke. Should smokers' health profiles fail to improve -- an indication that they are sneaking cigarettes at home -- they may be fired...
...thing to ban smoking on the job; that is already done by such organizations as the Christian Science Monitor and Greyhound. But labor lawyers are convinced that USG is treading on wispy legal ground in trying to extend its prohibition past working hours. USG's plan, they say, will run into problems of discrimination against minorities or against the physically disabled. Editorialized the Chicago Sun Times: "The issue here isn't whether smoking is good or bad. The issue is this: How far can an employer reach into the employees' personal lives? Not this...
...USG's smokers entirely agree. Complained Walt Marotz of Holyoke, Minn., a worker in Cloquet, Minn.: "They're starting to pry into our personal business now. I'll stop smoking at work, but what I do at home, there's no way they can stop...
Critics concede that there could be a medical justification for unusually tough antismoking regulations for employees at plants that have dust from mineral fibers, but argue that USG is mainly interested in fending off workers' future liability suits. USG's strategy could spread to other lung- threatening industries -- chemicals and rubber, for example -- in which companies are beginning to realize that they need to do everything they can to warn their workers of health risks if they are to avoid choking legal problems...