Virtual ban on workplace smoking (fwd)

[Robert Weissman <rob@essential.org>]

Virtual ban on workplace smoking
Many offices are already smoke free
Source: BBC Online, Thursday, 7/29/99

Thursday, July 29, 1999 Published at 09:58 GMT 10:58 UK


The Health and Safety Executive is considering tough guidance forcing
employers to ban smoking in the workplace wherever "reasonably possible".

If adopted, the guidance - which clarifies how existing health and safety
law should be applied - will mean offices, factories and workshops should
become no-smoking zones, although employers will be allowed to provide
smoking rooms.

However, it will not require pubs and restaurants to ban smoking, just to
reduce employees' exposure to passive smoking as much as possible.

This could take the form of improving ventilation and making bar counters
no smoking areas.

Public health measures

The government's recent White Paper, Smoking Kills, proposed a voluntary
code for the hospitality industry to reduce customer and staff exposure to
passive smoking.

Critics accused the government of lacking the courage to impose a blanket
ban on smoking in public places.

The new guidance, however, would put a legal requirement on the owners and
managers of restaurants and pubs to reduce the effects smoke pollution.

At the moment it is at the consultation stage, with the Health and Safety
Commission (HSC) having published a draft Approved Code of Practice.

'Clean air'

Action on Smoking and Health said the guidance was good news for smokers
and non-smokers alike, as it would help the former to give up and the
latter to breathe clean air.

Clive Bates, director of the organisation, said the guidance would force
employers to act.

Clive Bates called for acceptance of the proposed guidance"Even in places
like pubs or restaurants, where there won't necessarily be a complete ban,
the employer will no longer have the 'do nothing and ignore it' option,"
he said.

He said people with respiratory problems would also benefit.

"Two million adults in the UK have asthma - for them passive smoking can
have an acute and traumatic impact and they should not have to face this
risk at work or be barred from certain kinds of job.

And he denied the guidance was an attack on smokers' rights.

"Tobacco industry groups claim that this infringes smokers' rights, but
non-smokers have a right to clean air and where there is a conflict, they
should come first," he said.

"It is the smokers that are causing the problem by filling the air with
smoke."

'Protect smokers too'

However, Simon Clark, director of the smoking rights group Forest,
disagreed.

"An employer's duty is to ensure the welfare of all his employees, and
that includes smokers," he said.

"A ban on smoking should therefore be a last resort, not a first option as
proposed by the HSC.

"More worrying is the very real threat to smokers' jobs. If you were an
employer and you know that employing a smoker, who would you employ - the
smoker or the non-smoker?

"The logical conclusion is not to employ anyone who smokes."

He also called on full exemption for the hospitality industry, saying
there was no need for it to be included in the current proposals unless
there was "a hidden agenda" to target it at a later date.

The consultation period is expected to last three months.