SENATE STANDING COMMITTEE: Internal Affairs

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Thank you Senator Napoleon.

I want all of you to think of if you'd ever be willing to work a shift from 6AM to midnight. And the day after Christmas at that. I knew a guy who did. And it wasn't the last time he did either. The devotion and hard work of this guy was second to none. He signed up to work on Thanksgiving, even though it was also his normal day off, and he was also sacrificing one of his weekend days to boot. But his dedication had a reason, he was saving the money from his overtime hours to open and start up his own clothing line and was planning on getting the money for a press of T-shirts with his own designs. You'd think any business would love to have this guy around and would probably look at him for promotion.

But he's not around anymore, and it's all because he one day came in with the obvious stench of marijuana on his clothes. That's it. Truthfully the site probably would've preferred to keep him, but the zero tolerance corporate policy didn't give them any choice. And herein is the problem. Now you can argue that was reckless and irresponsible, perhaps it was. It's not unreasonable to expect employees to come to work sober and well aware. But if a guy wants to stay at home one day getting high and calls in and it just counts as a sick day, that's quite a bit of a different consequence. Being sent home without pay for the rest of the day and it counting as an unexcused might not be unreasonable for someone behaving recklessly, but saying that person can never work ever again and bring what they offer to the table all because of that one incident is quite a bit different.It's even worse if this is all due to some randomly selected drug test from a person who never caused issues or trouble at work.

I strongly support this bill and ask all people to support it as well. Your employer has the right to ask you to do a satisfactory job up to standard. Your employer perhaps even has a right to ask you to be free of certain influences during work hours. But your employer does not have the right to dictate what you do in your free time as long as it does not affect your work. Companies don't fire employees if they discover that are cheating on their spouses with each other, or for non-work related but dangerous offenses like DUIs, all of which are far worse than the personal use of legal substances. Let's get some common sense into company policy, something that I know even many middle managers and HR directors would prefer.