Cigarette Addiction: Disability...?

That's kind of stretching it, isn't it? To claim that your unwillingness to give up smoking cigarettes, despite its obvious deleterious effect on health, lifestyle, ability to conduct oneself responsibly as an employee, makes you a helpless victim of a disability? A disability, moreover, that should be recognized by the law of the land, compelling a reluctant potential employer to make unwilling concessions.

That's exactly what the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal has expressed a willingness to take on; a complaint by a woman from Kelowna that she was denied a job based on the apprehension of a supervisor tasked with interviewing job seekers to fill the position of a part-time operations clerk with the city. The woman, Roxanne Stevenson, did not, apparently, positively impress her interviewer.

The result being that she was not offered the position. One of the questions asked of Ms. Stevenson during the interview was whether she was reliable, whether she could be relied upon to show up for work regularly. Absenteeism no problem, she assured her interviewer; she had "perfect attendance". Yet her personnel file indicated numerous sick days in previous city posts.

The city, in turning down her application, claimed it was their opinion she was not suitable for the job in question. She, however, has laid claim to discrimination on the basis of her smoking habit. An email written by the city's human resources manager cited the supervisor noting her heavy smoking habit, assuming that to have led to ill health and missed working days.

An additional notation set down the observation that the job applicant "reeked of smoke ... was coughing regularly and clearing her throat". These observations are commensurate with a supervisor taking clear responsibility for evaluating and decision-making with respect to a potential employee; one in good working health and reliably entrusted with good attendance at the workplace.

How many employers would be enthused at the prospect of hiring an employee who, when questioned, did not hesitate to respond untruthfully? Which Ms. Stevenson did, in evaluating her own attendance record and attesting it to be superlative, when it clearly was not. Workplace smoking is forbidden fairly generally, but there is no law, nor should there be, that forbids people to smoke on their own time.

But when they do so, and in the process impair their health to the extent that they cannot even conduct a job interview without incessantly coughing and hacking, an extremely poor impression is in the offing. There are no laws that can insist that an interviewee for a position must be hired simply because they present themselves for an interview.

The impression an interviewee makes on an interviewer is due to many variables, not the least of which is a perception of honesty, of reliability. People also assess others on the basis of their physical presentation, along with personality and response techniques. To claim that failure to attract a job offer is unfair based on the presumption of rejection due to a disability is pushing things a bit too far.

And if the complainant feels she has a legitimate grievance, it should be toward herself she should file dissatisfaction. That, while acknowledging her smoking habit as an addiction, and a 'disability', she nonetheless does nothing to help herself, while insisting on the right to inflict the end results of her misfortune upon others.