Smokers shut out

The Malaysian Trades Union Congress (MTUC) has criticized the growing tendency among employers to reject job applicants who are habitual smokers, according to a story in The Free Malaysia Today (FMT).
Employers should be concerned only with a person’s ability to work, MTUC secretary-general J Solomon was said to have told FMT.
“Smoking is not illegal, and companies cannot dictate the personal choices of employees,” he said.
The Malaysian Employers Federation (MEF) director Shamsuddin Bardan agreed, saying such a hiring policy would be discriminatory unless the nature of the job required abstention from smoking.
“Unless non-smoking is critical to a business, such as a health or food business, then it is discrimination,” he said.
The FMT story said that a growing number of companies, especially in foreign countries, were adding ‘non-smoking’ as a job requirement, with dozens of Australian companies doing so.
And checks by FMT had found that several Malaysian companies had begun to follow suit.
Molly Cheah, president of the Malaysian Council for Tobacco Control, said she supported such a policy.
“More employers should consider this move,” she said. “If you’re an employer, you would want your employees to be healthy.”
But Solomon said smoking was only one of many factors employers needed to consider if they cared about their workers’ health.
“If you want to talk about employees’ health, you must look at it in totality,” he said. “Factors like work stress and the conduciveness of the working environment need to be looked into to see whether they are in line with international safety and health standards.”
However, he said it would be fair to set rules on smoking during working hours. “But make sure it applies across the board,” he said. “If employees aren’t allowed to smoke, then neither should the company’s CEO. Just like a dress code, the rule should apply to everyone.”