On 2011-08-29, Steve Firth wrote:

Yup. I got stared at long and hard in company "personnel" meetings when
I asked if I could take 15-20 minutes off every hour to go and stand
outside and read a paper/chat with my mates/stare at girls as the
smokers appear to have free licence to do, or failing that to get paid
30% more per day than the smokers. The addicts of course claim that they
do just as much work as the non-addicts but don't seem to able to
explain how they make up their absences.

The difficult thing is that my libertarian leaning side says it's their
body they can abuse it as they wish, but another part of me says:

a) As long as they don't impact on my health/sensibility.
b) As long as they get their "fix" entirely in their own time.

As far as (b) goes, in a work environment smokers should clock in/out
for all tobacco breaks.

I still find the stench of working next to a smoker unacceptable, but it
seems that not much can be done about that, although workers with BO are
told by their superiors to clean themselves up.

An extremely libertarian perspective might be that employers should be
free to set whatever smoking/non-smoking policies they want, and
prospective employees can accept them or go elsewhere; *some*
libertarians seriously argue against anti-discrimination laws on the
grounds that, in the long term at least, racist employers will be less
successful than non-racist ones (because they are drawing employees
from a smaller pool selected without regard to competence). ("In the
long run we are all dead." -- J M Keynes)