Downwave

[frank_davis]

A line in an article in Der Spiegel from a few months back caught my attention:

In an interview with the German daily Die Welt, Dalli announced that he would take much stronger action against smoking and that the European Commission would introduce plans for new legislation in 2011

Comments

[anonymous]

In my personal experience the best, most productive, effective, creative, focussed, co-operative and adaptable employees anywhere I have ever worked have always and without exception been the smokers. There was a study not so long ago done in Sweden whereby they discovered that employees who take regular breaks away from their work were actually more productive than those who stayed at their desk, or their workbench, or their machine continuously. Sorry, don’t have a link - it was a while ago - but I think the reason given was that the brain needed some “switch off” time every now and again to rest and refocus itself

[frank_davis]

In my personal experience the best, most productive, effective, creative, focussed, co-operative and adaptable employees anywhere I have ever worked have always and without exception been the smokers.

I agree.

But if you're looking to cut costs, and increase productivity, getting rid of the guy with a cigarette in one hand and a mug of coffee in the other may well look an awful like the most obvious way to go.

Frank

Productivity

[anonymous]

It's not the smokers, it's the bans. The bans force the smokers to stop working and take a break to smoke instead of doing both at once

Re: Productivity

[nisakiman]

That's very interesting. If you have some links on the subject that I could follow, I'd be most appreciative.

I've always found non-smokers to be somewhat more dour and introspective in the workplace, but hadn't realised it was a quantifiable issue. I have to say I'm not altogether surprised though. I remember a while ago getting into a minor spat on a forum with a guy who smugly (why are they always so smug?) proclaimed that he always asked prospective employees if they smoked, and if the answer was an affirmative he would tell them (gleefully) that he didn't employ smokers. I remember saying that I'd tell anyone who asked me a question like that to stuff his job where the sun don't shine. (Not that I've applied for a job in a long time, having been an independant operator for 25+ years.) I also seem to remember asking him if qualification for the job was irrelevant, pointing out that he was severely limiting his choices. But he was the typical anti, blind to anything but his own over-inflated opinion.

Re: Productivity

[frank_davis]

It's not the smokers, it's the bans. The bans force the smokers to stop working and take a break to smoke instead of doing both at once.

Good point. People never used to take cigarette breaks. So in that respect smoking bans reduce productivity.

That aside, the idea that we supposedly exist to be "productive" cogs in the state machine is uncomfortably statist and downright dystopian.

When I started writing the above piece, I was going to address this matter. I ended up writing something else.

f anyone wants or needs citations on the "smokers are better," let me know,

I'd like to hear more too.

Frank

[anonymous]

And, 100 years ago, there was of course Henry Ford of the Ford motor company. Perhaps when you become the chief executive of a company, rather than an employee, you want to see your employees working hard.Employment discrimination against smokers is not new. It was a feature of the eugenics-driven antismoking crusade of early-1900s USA. There was a trend in the antismoking fervor to not employ smokers. Henry Ford was one of those

[anonymous]

Consider another insight into the eugenics mentality:

Proctor (1997) provides considerable detail as to the extent of antismoking sentiment and measures by the Nazi regime: Tobacco was opposed by racial hygienists fearing the corruption of the German germ plasm, by industrial hygienists fearing a reduction of work capacity, by nurses and midwives fearing harms for the ‘maternal organism’. Tobacco was said to be ‘a corrupting force in a rotting civilization that has become lazy’, a cause of impotence among men and frigidity among women. The Nazi-era antitobacco rhetoric drew from an earlier generation’s eugenic rhetoric, combining this with an ethic of bodily purity and performance at work. Tobacco use was attacked as ‘epidemic’, as a ‘plague’, as ‘dry drunkenness’ and ‘lung masturbation’; tobacco and alcohol abuse were ‘diseases of civilization’ and ‘relics of a liberal lifestyle.’ (p.441).Eugenics represents a self-installed elite that view themselves as owning/ruling the rest of the population. Its essential foundation is

[anonymous]

Even the US Military is attempting to go “smokefree”, claiming a detriment to physical performance - even in young men. [Both the government health bureaucracy and the Defense Force health bureaucracy are dominated by the eugenics mentality] Yet this really contradicts the history of the cigarette in the military