I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober, and not hungover what business is it of the employers what the employee does on their own time?
The drugs that are readily detectable are mostly the ones that don’t matter too, while the ones that are more concerning (to me anyway) are either not tested for or are not detectable fairly fast.
And alcohol is ok to abuse. Why?
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.
It is BS, but I was under the impression it's more a CYA strategy for liability if a worker has an accident that puts the company at risk. IE imagine a roofer drops a shingle on someone's head, accidents happen and the roofer was sober but if they can't pass a drug test the company could be in serious hot water in a negligence lawsuit. BS runs downhill, so to speak.
You can also deny workman's comp claims if somebody blows a drug test. They are powerfully financially incentivized to fish for a hot sample in the case of an accident.
Basically shit rolls down hill-most of the factories I work with care because of 2 reasons:
1) Contract language that says your workforce has to be drug free (government sourced contracts doubly so)
2) Insurance. If you have a fork lift driver run into a rack of transmissions (or drive your work truck into a building) your insurance is going to demand a urine test. If the urine test comes back unclean they will deny your claim.
stealth intelligence test. For a variety of interesting historical reasons, the government hates intelligence tests as a hiring criteria and this is the blue collar stealth/workaround IQ test. Its the blue collar equivalent of fizzbuzz or a gitlab repo.
Look, you got one task, one task only, it's not even hard to figure out, do not, repeat, do not, get high the week or two before your pee test. That simple. There are human bipeds burning valuable oxygen right now, who can't follow a test that elaborate and complicated. They are literally the kind of people where if you told them not to lick a circuit breaker, would turn around and an hour later electrocute themselves and probably a coworker or two by licking a circuit breaker on the jobsite. Whats the minimum IQ and discipline level necessary to pass a pee test? Not much, but there are failures out there walking around...
Its interesting that as far as I know this is the first strictly chemistry based IQ test. AFAIK there is no "pee in a bottle to determine if you can fizzbuzz" test for code monkey work. No chemical marker that can identify if you know the modulus operator... not yet...
> ...do not, get high the week or two before your pee test.
In case someone is wondering, hair follicle tests are apparently problematic [1]; had to look that up because I remembered correctly that follicle tests can show use over the long-term, but didn't know some of the intrinsic challenges with that method. Come to think of it, I've never been asked to submit a hair sample when I've had to pass FBI interviews and drug tests to gain admittance to extremely-sensitive data centers at some of my clients in the past.
The "week or two" needs contextual guidance. An article on Wikipedia [2] gives a good run down of the detection periods. I would imagine detecting pot is the most common request, so that's about 100 days on the conservative side for a heavy (daily?) user, but apparently three weeks is fine for more casual users (what, once a week?).
My addiction to coffee involved no poor choices, I don’t regret it and it makes me a better person. Lack of it makes my performance much worse, I get a migraine with vertigo and vomiting.
You seem to be confusing physical dependence with addiction. By your definition, you'd be addicted to food, as I'm sure you'd have adverse consequences, including worse performance, in its absence.
Addiction is continued use in the face of adverse consequences. [1] You may have a physical dependence on coffee, but it doesn't sound like you're experiencing negative consequences in your life from its use.
If you are unable to refrain for 2 weeks, then you are not the kind of person who they want to hire, because it means you will also not refrain when you are on duty.
Its a different sort of refrain problem. We expect you'll refrain from activity X when we tell you to for a short reasonable period of time. When X is smoking weed this is seen as a big problem, mostly by weed smokers. When X is applying electrical power to this machine's cabinet someone is working in by hacking around the lockout-tagout locks, this seems a common sense test for a jobsite. We can't test for the latter but we can proactively predict by testing for the former. There are plenty of blue collar jobs where lack of awareness and self control and logical analysis of cause and effect mean someone dies. Weed smoking is a simple test of self awareness and self control and intelligence (WRT understanding the whole problem situation)
> I hate the drug testing bs. How is that relevant? If the worker is present, is sober
Have you ever seen a lathe accident, for example?
You can't spot test for being high on marijuana or pills like you can for drunkenness, so you rely on the urine test to keep everyone on the floor safe from being crushed in a press by a stoned co-worker (or themselves.)
I’ve seen a fair few industrial accidents including amputations and deaths. I don’t think that the injuries we have each seen are very relevant.
The things that are detected and punished are not necessarily the things that cause harm. Smoking pot a week ago isn’t actually a problem. Being tired from watching Netflix all night is far worse, as are a few other things, including drugs which aren’t readily detected. The imperfect system currently used causes one hell of a lot of harm. There needs to be something, but the current system isn’t right.
You have two job applicants. The only thing you know about them is their resume (nicely embellished) and how they performed at their interview (nicely rehearsed). One applicant passes a drug test, one does not.
Can you really say that drug test outcomes don't change the risk assessment of each candidate?
We can have a conversation about whether employers ought to have access to that information, the same way we can say that employers ought not to have access to a candidate's medical history or prior salary figure, because society is better served when employers don't have access to these prejudicial sources of data. But that is a different question than whether the information is useful at all in hiring decisions, which of course it is.
If the complaint is that you can't find enough workers because too many are failing drug tests[1], then your hypothetical of having "two job applicants" (for an implicit one spot to be filled) is already moot.
I mean, that's the thing, it's a hypothetical. The non-existence of workers with clean drug tests in the real applicant pool doesn't mean that a failing drug test is less of a risk signal in real applicants.
Remember, new hires are not guaranteed to add value - even if they worked for free, there is always a risk that some will reduce value. If a new hire's inability to show up on time holds up a production line, or a new hire's irresponsibility damages equipment, then you're better off not making the hire, even if you desire, in the abstract, to hire more people and expand your business.
I have never had a drug test, and that includes several jobs working for defense contractors. (The law said they had to have a plan for testing anyone they suspected of drug use. It didn't say they had to suspect anyone.)
I've never had security clearance of any kind. Highlights that all required drug testing were: restaurant national headquarters, towing/insurance national headquarters, theme park, defense contractor for non-secure projects, and a bank.
Though now that I think about it I have technically worked at two companies that didn't drug test: my own, and a small 3-man startup I did some work for.
It's worth mentioning that I live in a red state. I suspect blue states have cultures that are a little more lax on drug testing, though I have no real data to back that up.
Here's the sectors I've worked in throughout my career: Insurance, banking, marketing, entertainment (theme park), restaurants, and defense. Every single one of my jobs in those sectors required drug tests prior to employment.
It would be interesting to test white collar workers.