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January 3, 2020 07:38 pm PST

U-Haul decides to stop hiring nicotine users

I live in the rural Southwest, and the recent news that trucking company U-Haul has decided to stop hiring people who smoke cigarettes is a big deal around here. People with few financial options tend to be the ones who take jobs as truckers and the like; those tend to be the same populations who smoke.

On this first week of the new year, U-Haul announced that it will no longer hire people who smoke or vape nicotine (or use it some other way) in the 21 states where companies are allowed to consider tobacco use when deciding whether or not to hire someone.

U-Haul has 30,000 employees in the U.S. and Canada. The new policy does not apply to current employees, and the new rule won't even apply to job applicants in most states.

But it's kind of a big deal.

In the Atlantic today, Amanda Mull writes about about U-Haul's decision, and how "workplace wellness" programs, in her words, seek to control the personal lives and choices of all workers, but especially those with few job options and financial resources.

Refusing work to tobacco users is an extreme measure, but its not unheard of in the United States, Mull writes in the Atlantic:

The issue with this approach is that it positions personal responsibility as a solution to problems that have little to do with individual choice. Codifying wellbeing into a competition with cash prizeslet alone using wellness as a criteria for hiring in the first placeposits that every worker can and should be striving for a particular set of (employer-determined) physical and mental goals that they could all reach if they just tried.

Read the rest

Original Link: http://feeds.boingboing.net/~r/boingboing/iBag/~3/E1ZMlThOtZc/u-haul-decides-to-stop-hiring.html

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