Employment: Weyco Inc. Page 2

Weyco acquired by Connecticut firm

August 17, 2006
Barbara Wieland
OKEMOS – Weyco Inc., the Okemos-based third-party benefits administrator that gained international attention for its strict anti-tobacco policy in 2005, has a new owner.

Weyco has become a wholly owned subsidiary of Meritain Health Inc., which is, in turn, a division of Westport, Conn.-based Prodigy Health Group. Terms of the sale weren’t disclosed.

There are no plans to lay off or hire workers because of the sale, Weyco founder Howard Weyers said. He will remain the president of Weyco.

People whose insurance plans are administered by Weyco won’t see major changes to their health care, either. Eventually, customers will gain access to larger networks of doctors and more online educational and insurance tools.

Weyco’s stringent employee tobacco policy will remain in place. In fact, he hopes his ideas will spread.

“This is my passion,” Weyers said. “Every employer should have several policies to help employees be as healthy as they can.”

Weyco grabbed attention when it ended the employment of four employees in January 2005. The workers refused to take a mandatory test to determine if they use tobacco.

Under company rules, tobacco use by employees is prohibited at all times, even when a worker is at home after business hours.

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You can get fired for your lifestyle
What you do at home — even if it’s legal — is no longer private

Jul 21, 2006
By Leif M. Wright, Phoenix Staff Writer

Most people have never read the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but it’s one of our most precious rights in America — one quickly being eroded by the Patriot Act and the inaction of courts to protect the little guy from the big guy with power.

The amendment was created because even though first-class citizens in England could by English law expect to be safe from unreasonable searches in their homes by the king’s agents, second-class citizens who lived in the American colonies could not. King’s officers in America received lifetime writs enabling them to search and seize any property for any purpose in the pursuit of unlawful goods.

The mean effect was that certain people had the right to be secure in their homes and persons — and certain people did not.

Now, why am I bringing this up?

Well, in Lansing, Mich., one employer created a rule that no smokers would work for his company. He gave employees a long warning and then began testing them for nicotine in their systems. If nicotine was found, they were fired.

The employees talked to the American Civil Liberties U nion and other lawyers and were shocked to find out there was nothing that could be done, since the vast majority of states in America are “at will” employment states, meaning your boss can pretty much fire you for any reason he or she wants.

That’s right. The government can’t search your house without a warrant, but if you smoke in the privacy of your own home, your employer could technically fire you and get away with it. At least in Michigan.

“I pay the bills around here. So, I’m going to set the expectations,” said Howard Weyers, the boss of the company that fired smokers. “What’s important? This job? And this is a very nice place to work. Or the use of tobacco? Make a decision.”

That sort of attitude is getting more prevalent in the workplace.
Smoking is viewed now as more than a vice. Its victims have become one of the groups that most people can discriminate against without fear of reprisal.

Obese people are protected by federal law against discrimination in the workplace, but smokers are not. Largely, the two situations are very similar. Smoking and obesity are caused by the behavior and habits of those who are victimized by them. Overweight people generally (with a few — but less than is often claimed — exceptions) eat too much and exercise too little. Smokers obviously buy cigarettes and smoke them. Both are addictive behaviors, at least psychologically.

“That’s because we legislate preferences,” said Muskogee attorney Lance McCrary. “Our constitutional system is based on the idea that you have a right unless it’s legislated away. This is a gray area in the law because of that principle. It’s presumed that it’s OK to test for certain things such as nicotene until there’s a law that says they can’t.”

It all comes down, McCrary said, to what you do when you vote.

“When you go to the polls, you’re saying, ‘Hey, this guy or woman is more on my page,’” he said. “Historically, the legal system is here to protect individual rights and the elected representatives are there to preserve majority thought.”

That’s a bit optimistic, I think. It seems more to me that representatives protect the rights of those who have money and access against the rights of those who have neither.
McCrary seemed to agree with me on that.

“I can tell you the difference between who gets hurt in court and who doesn’t,” he said. “And a lot of it boils down to money. Some of the decisions I see in court today are contrary to the law, but if you don’t have the money to appeal it, you’re just stuck. It’s not fair, but who said life is fair? But the judges here are pretty good. Some of the smaller communities have problems, but the judges here are good.”

What does all this have to do with entertainment? After all, Weekend is the entertainment section of the Muskogee Phoenix.

The fact is, what you do with your free time can affect your employment, even if it’s legal. It’s completely legal for you to drink alcohol and smoke, but if your employer decides he or she doesn’t want drinkers or smokers working for him, it’s entirely possible you could be fired for your recreational activities.
Illegal drugs, of course, opened the door, with employers testing for the presence of drugs in employees’ systems as either a precondition of hiring or to make sure they didn’t have drug addicts working for them.

But that open door has now extended, and as employers explore their newly discovered rights, you can bet some will begin to restrict what you can do in your free time.

Health care costs are skyrocketing, and lifestyle management is the name of the game today. Smoking is bad for you. Drinking to excess can be bad for you in many ways, not just in the liver disease kind of way.

As employers look to keep the costs of their healthcare plans down, they could justify (at least to themselves and their lawyers) such lifestyle Big Brotherism — and that means you could later pay at work for the completely legal things you do in your own free and private time.

These are scary times indeed. The bottom line, McCrary told me, is employers can get away with this kind of stuff because you aren’t forced to work for them. You can look for jobs elsewhere.

That seems like no justification, though. It seems to me that the government is looking the other way while employers use their position to dictate the private lives of their employees based upon their own bottom line or their own moral judgment. The victim in the nicotine case above wasn’t on the employer’s health plan, so it wouldn’t have hurt his bottom line to keep her employed. In the end, it was his moral judgment that smoking was a negative character trait that lost his victims their jobs.

And that’s wrong.

The two-class citizenry that inspired the Fourth Amendment has returned, only now it’s not based on geography, it’s based on whether or not you have money.

Those in power don’t care about whether or not your rights are protected against those who employ you. They only care about being re-elected, and you don’t donate enough money to get their attention.

You can reach Leif M. Wright at 684-2906 or lmwright@muskogeephoenix. com — unless your employer decides that you can’t.

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