Why not just give an automated field-sobriety test for alertness, judgment, and reflexes at the start of each shift?
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.
How exactly would an automated sobriety test make use of a qualitative metric?
Is a score on a video game quantifiable enough for you? There are so many "brain training" games that do nothing but score you on your observation, working memory, reflexes, etc. Back in college, everyone had to participate in the psych experiment test pool, where many of the experiments were coded in extremely rudimentary Visual Basic, to show video clips and record the time intervals between on-screen events and keypresses.
That's more objective than a human checking your eyeballs to see if there are too many involuntary movements, or making a subjective determination that there weren't enough social displays of submission to the tester. And it scales better to have X computers set up for employees to test and clock in at the same time than to have a supervisor processing the whole line one by one.
Exactly. The only downside I imagine is that it could give false-positives to retarded people. Reaction speed is pretty well correlated with intelligence.
I suppose the system could compare your current score with your baseline / sober scores. Or, mentally slow people would simply have less tolerance for being fucked up at work.
That could be fought while there is little leeway in terms of fighting "my training and 15 years of experience allowed me to determine that the subject was impaired".
No one is required to give you a job. The increased cost to do that everyday is not worth it to the company if they can weed out possible irresponsible workers from a drug test. It’s work, not a babysitter.
All everyone is talking about is weed which I’m sure most of us agree shouldn’t be tested for but we don’t even know what the failed tests failed for.
This whole tree of comments is a response to someone complaining that it's hard for a company to find workers. Nobody's saying that company is required to hire anyone - we are just making suggestions to help them with their problem.
If labor is turning into a seller's market, buyers are going to have to adjust.
I think you underestimate the cost differential between contracting with a lab to drug-test your employees on an ongoing basis, and with hiring a software developer once to make a rudimentary video game that positively correlates a passing score with operating heavy industrial equipment safely for the next 8 hours.
Hell, you could set up an old Atari with Frogger in it, and require employees to score X points before clocking in. It might not have a very strong correlation, but it sure would be cheaper and more goal-specific than drug testing.
It would more likely take the form of "watch this simulated surveillance video of the work floor, and press the space bar to stop the machinery on the entire production line". When someone steps over the warning tape on the floor around the person-shredder, you press the button. If someone gets their sleeve stuck in the dude-grinder, you press the button. If the part-spewer starts stamping out misaligned doohickeys, you press the button. If your response time is too slow, you aren't fit to clock in for today's shift. Or it could be a simulation of operating the actual machine that employee uses, attempting to predict their productivity for the day.
It has the added benefit of sneaking safety training videos into the daily workflow.
Considering that drug tests for operators of heavy machinery are mostly about legal liability, has a system like you propose ever been tested in front of a jury?
You would have to ask a lawyer that specializes in corporate ass-covering. I'm more interested in practical solutions that result in actual safety improvements.
I am not even aware of any jury trial that has decided on the impact of random drug screenings. As far as I am aware, most claims relating to workplace injuries are settled long before the jury pool is even tapped, and many of the remainder are settled before the jury gets a chance to reach a decision. So I think the question you should be asking is if it is likely that any actuary would be willing to analyze the experimental data from such a program, to adjust their company's insurance premiums for anyone using similar software.
If a correlation can be shown, the premiums would be discounted. Actuaries are better with the math than juries are, after all.
A labor union or government regulator could possibly demand such a system in lieu of random drug tests, but your average company does not have enough commitment to worker safety--for its own sake, rather than for its impact on their worker compensation insurance premiums--to experiment in this fashion. They would need a reason that increases revenue or cuts costs.
Right... but this thread is about employers complaining that they can't find qualified applicants. They can't have it both ways. If they want to continue to be picky, and carry on with the "No one owes you a job" bs, then they shouldn't be taken seriously when they complain about not being able to find people.
Other than being extremely complicated to setup, has the ability for people to socially engineer themselves out of it and costing 1 hour of work per day per person yea you could do this .
Pass the test, and you can clock in and get to work. Fail the test, hit the nap room (unpaid) for a while, and try again when you wake up.
It would catch people who are drunk, high, having a stroke, or just sleepy, rather than just the guy who used cannabis two weekends ago and is perfectly capable of working now.