Addicted Employees: Dealing With Porn, Drugs, and Booze
| Publication year | 2010 |
| Pages | 28 |
Vol. 23, No. 5, 28. Addicted Employees: Dealing with Porn, Drugs, and Booze
Volume 23 No. 5
Sep/Oct 2010
Introduction
What does the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 have in common with the 2008 collapse of the financial market? Both disasters have been linked to employees suffering from addictions. Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez, was a known alcoholic who was reported as being drunk at the time of the spill. See Exxon Valdez Remembrance Committee, Corporate Hubris, http://www.remembertheexxonvaldez.com/ (noting Exxon's "failure to act responsibly and firmly" in dealing with the captain who had a history of drinking aboard ship, had dropped out of an alcohol treatment program, and drank between five and nine double shots of vodka on the night of the spill). Similarly, news sources recently exposed more than thirty senior employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission whose pornography addictions led them to spend up to eight hours a day online viewing and downloading pornographic images while at work instead of policing Wall Street. See Daniel Indiviglio, Did Porn Cause the Financial Crisis?, (Apr. 23, 2010), http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/ did-porn-cause-the-financial-crisis/39414/; Jonathan Karl, SeC and Pornography: Workers Spent Hours on Porn Sites Instead of Stopping Fraud, (Apr. 22, 2010), http://abcnews.go.com/ WN/sec-pornography-employees-spent-hours-surfing-porn-sites/ story?id=10451508.
Although the above examples are extreme, the cost of addiction for employers is high and may include lost productivity, absenteeism, and employer liability for actions performed with impaired judgment.
As of 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy estimated that drug abuse resulted in $128.6 billion in lost productivity. Further, employees who use drugs are 2.2 times more likely to request time off, 3 times more likely to be late for work, and 3.6 times more likely to be involved in a workplace accident. See Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Drugs in the Workplace (2008), available at workplace.samhsa.gov/Workplaces/ pdf/WorkplaceDrugUseFactSheet.pdf. About 500 million workdays are lost annually due to alcoholism, and alcoholism is linked to nearly 40% of industrial fatalities. See id.
While employers should not have to tolerate certain behavior, the law provides protections to employees who qualify as "disabled." This begs the question of whether addictions are a type of disability recognized by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and/or a serious medical condition under the Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) for which accommodation or leave is mandated. In some cases, the answer could be yes, and employers must understand what, if any, responsibility they have to accommodate or support recovering addicts.
A Widespread Problem
Likely, every employer has felt or will feel the detrimental effects of addiction on their business. Utah companies are no exception.
The National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that in 2008, 22.2 million people aged twelve or...
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