Employers Having A Difficult Time Finding Employees Who Can Pass A Drug Test
The war on drugs has permeated our entire society. Police have been militarized and given almost limitless power, entire industries have developed around detecting illicit drugs, and employers have become snoops that test employees for illicit drug use. The last one really baffles me.
Outside of being coerced at the point of the State's gun, why would an employer waste their time and the time of their employees testing them for drug use? If an employee is performing their job satisfactorily an employer shouldn't care what that employee puts into their body. If an employee isn't performing their job satisfactorily then the employer will likely terminate them regardless of the reason. But employers have allowed themselves to become snoops for the State and is do doing have handicapped themselves:
SAVANNAH, Ga. — A few years back, the heavy-equipment manufacturer JCB held a job fair in the glass foyer of its sprawling headquarters near here, but when a throng of prospective employees learned the next step would be drug testing, an alarming thing happened: About half of them left.
That story still circulates within the business community of this historic port city. But the problem has gotten worse.
All over the country, employers say they see a disturbing downside of tighter labor markets as they try to rebuild from the worst recession since the Depression: They are struggling to find workers who can pass a pre-employment drug test.
That hurdle partly stems from the growing ubiquity of drug testing, at corporations with big human resources departments, in industries like trucking where testing is mandated by federal law for safety reasons, and increasingly at smaller companies.
I've heard a lot of people who work in human resource departments at software development firms joke about how their companies would lose all of their employees if they actually started doing drug testing. It's good evidence that users of illicit drugs aren't incapable of performing reliably. This is especially true when many drugs that are declared illegal aren't actually that harmful. Cannabis, for example, is an example of a drug that's still illegal in many states but doesn't actually cause a great deal of harm. In fact it can improve an individual's performance at work by helping them coax with anxiety or stress.
The lesson from this story is that you should not volunteer to enforce the State's policies. Even though the State has declared a massive list of chemicals illegal that doesn't mean you, as an employer, should volunteer to test your employees. You gain no advantage from it (when's the last time you heard of the State giving a sizable reward to an employer for drug testing their employees) and actually put yourself at a severe disadvantage by limiting your pool of potential employees.