Slippery Slope: Paychecks Docked for Fat Smokers

It is probably legal but is stupid. I am a physician with a BMI waaay over 30 who smokes an occasional cigar. And it is my own freaking business! My employers only business is whether I do my job and how well I do it. My health is not their business. When you are interviewed for jobs, they are usually scared to even ask your age or questions about your health. The notion that asking about it is wrong, and then micromanaging it after people are hired is right is senseless.

The reason it is stupid is because it is degrading paternalism that self-responsible adults aren’t going to tolerate. It will drive off just the sort of independently thinking self-actuated people that make organizations work, selecting instead for the passive-dependent types who want a parent instead of an employer.

If you humiliate a highly productive fat employee by docking his pay, he isn’t going to lose weight, he will go to work for someone who will pay him for what he can do, not what he looks like–leaving you with your less productive people, the ones without the confidence or initiative to stand up for themselves.

Anon 8:57,

AMEN! My thoughts exactly. This is is the most retarded thing I have ever read. Even worse than what CCF is planning to do. These businesses better get a back lash from all this, or we are all going to be in trouble.

My brother, who has never been a day overweight in his life, has horribly high cholesterol. I mean into the 600s sometimes. But, it has nothing to do with what he eats. In fact, when he is on the low fat diet his liver just thinks something is wrong and makes more of it. it is a hereditary issue. Why should these people be punished for this? I have had high BP almost all my life, but so did my mother and her mother. We aren’t overweight and our weight seems to not effect it.

Not all of them, 5:46. Some have become sideline hecklers and cheapshot artists like yourself.

Especially when he has no idea of whom is speaking, whether anon 5:46 is a Walter Mitty on the sideline, or “in the arena . . . face marred by dust and sweat and blood.” No idea at all.

None of the comments express an expectation that the employer pay the tab. You are assuming rather than observing.

Other than that, I agree. I take my entire compensation in cash and buy my own insurance. I value the freedom to take care of myself over being taken care of.