WHERE THERE'S SMOKE, NO HIRE : FIRMS DISCOURAGE SMOKERS EMPLOYER TOBACCO RESTRICTIONS USED TO WEED OUT COSTLY HABIT.

Byline: Martha Nolan McKenzie The New York Times

The sign at the entrance to Kimball Physics is unambiguous. Smoking is prohibited in the building. What's more, the company's policy and its sign state that people cannot enter the building if they have smoked a cigarette within two hours. If visitors even smell as if they have been smoking, the company receptionist politely but firmly tells them to come back later.

``Smoking doesn't stop when the cigarette is out,'' said Chuck Crawford, president of Kimball Physics, a producer of electron optics in Wilton, N.H. ``Residuals get in the clothes and the hair. Many of our workers are allergic to tobacco smoke, and even low levels cause a lot of people a lot of distress.''

The smoking policy at Kimball Physics was not always so detailed. A few years ago, the company was one of many that tried to hire only nonsmokers, but after the New Hampshire Legislature passed a smokers' rights law that made such hiring practices illegal, Kimball went to the new policy. Crawford said that as far as he knew, no one at Kimball was a smoker.

The American Civil Liberties Union says that studies done in the 1980s, when anti-smoking policies became popular, found that about 6 percent of all employers refused to hire smokers, citing increased health care costs and a higher rate of absenteeism among smokers.

While some companies have abandoned those policies, either because they were impractical or because the businesses were forced to do so by state laws, other companies, like Kimball, are so adamant about excluding smokers that they have tried other ways to accomplish that goal.

Using measures like forbidding smoking on company property or charging smokers more for health insurance, companies have made it hard, and sometimes almost impossible, for smokers to work for them.

``The overriding concern among employers is the recognition of just how expensive it is'' to have smokers as employees, said John Banzhaf, executive director of the nonsmokers advocacy group Action on Smoking and Health and a law professor at George Washington University in Washington.

``One study done years ago estimated it at $5,000 per employee at that time,'' Banzhaf said, noting that companies are becoming stricter in their policies. ``So if you can't base your hiring directly on whether a person smokes or not, you can certainly enact strict workplace prohibitions and basically accomplish the same thing.''

Twenty-eight states, including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, as well as the District of Columbia, have passed laws that protect smokers against job discrimination. The statutes were spurred by a 1991 lawsuit brought by an employee of Ford Meter Box Co. in Wabash, Ind., who was dismissed after a company drug test found nicotine in her urine. Ford Meter Box's policy was no smoking, on or off the job.

``People really saw this case as employers going too far,'' said Walker Merryman, vice president of the Tobacco Institute in Washington, D.C. ``Much of the legislation was in response to that case.''

In 1992, New York retailer Fortunoff had to abandon a policy against hiring smokers after the state passed a smokers' rights law. Instead, the company now charges smokers more for health coverage.

``Once we were forced to hire smokers again, we implemented a two-tiered deductible system for our health insurance,'' said Louis Fortunoff, the company's vice president. Under the system, a smoker pays $4 to $5 more each week for health insurance than a nonsmoker does.

``Because of that differential, and because we have a smoke-free workplace, we don't hire too many smokers,'' Fortunoff said. ``They de-select us. As a result, only about 3 percent to 4 percent of our 2,000 employees smoke.''

At Pratt & Whitney in East Hartford, Conn., employees cannot smoke inside any of the company's buildings and are restricted to where and when they can smoke outside on company property: only in designated areas, and only on their lunch hours and before and after their shifts. Workers are not allowed to smoke on their other breaks. Smokers are charged $500 more a year for health insurance than nonsmokers.

New Brunswick Scientific Co., a maker of biotech equipment in Edison, N.J., also charges smokers more for their health coverage. Chairman David Freedman says he allows any of his 350 employees to smoke outside the building on the company property, but he is thinking of banning that, too.

``People who smoke spend a lot of their time outside smoking, so they have a great deal more time off than the nonsmokers,'' he said.

While Freedman said he never had a formal written policy against hiring smokers, he did have ``a program of discouraging managers from hiring smokers'' before smokers'-rights legislation was passed.

He said he felt he should still be able to turn away applicants who are smokers. ``I think that law should be contested,'' he said. ``It's a bad law.''

Lewis Maltby, director of the Workplace Rights Office of the ACLU in Manhattan, said companies that banned smoking from their property or charged smokers more for health coverage in an attempt to get around the law were doing nothing illegal.

``None of the state laws speak to what an employer can do on its own property,'' Maltby said. ``What they all do is draw a line between the employer's property and the employee's own home and tell the employer he can't cross that line.''

Crawford of Kimball Physics takes a philosophical view of smokers' rights legislation. ``Is it really appropriate for a for-profit corporation to control what legal activities their employees engage in on their own time?'' he said. ``I'd have to say no.

``But it is appropriate to protect people in the company who don't want to be subjected to high or low levels of a toxic substance. Not protecting them would be much worse than bad manners.''

Photo: Chuck Crawford, president of Kimball Physics in New Hampshire, stands in front of the entrance to his workplace, where a sign warns visitors and employees that no one will be admitted if they have smoked a cigarette within two hours of arriving at the facility.

The New York Times

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