According to this article on MinnPost, a Florida judge struck down a law put into place by the governor which would have permitted drug tests to be performed on public employees without suspicion. While the governor argues that public employees, because information is made public about them, including their salaries, they should not have any reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to their drug use–something which the judge disagreed with.
From the article:
“The Governor’s reasoning is hardly transparent and frankly obscure,” Judge Ungaro wrote in her Thursday ruling. “He offers no plausible rationale explaining why the fact that a state employee’s work product and financial status are publicly accessible leads to the conclusion that the employee’s expectation of privacy in his or her bodily functions and fluids is then diminished.”
While I have had jobs in both the public and private sectors, the only place where there was no fear of retribution for anything was within the public. No, drug use should not be condoned by the taxpayers and all government workers should definitely be drug tested at the start of employment as well as randomly (suspicionless) throughout their time with the state. While the private sector is free to operate as they see fit, the members employed by the taxpayers should be held to a higher standard and be required to prove their work is not impacted by their off (or on) hours drug use. The governor’s comment which made the absolute most sense was when he noted that if the government workers didn’t like the rule they should find work elsewhere. Exactly.
What about you? Do you think public sector employees should be drug tested regularly and randomly? Are you surprised to learn that public employees are NOT drug tested at the beginning of their employment (at least in MN)? Do you think that public employees should be held to a higher standard than the private sector? Whatever you have to say about this one vote on the sidebar and then comment on below. After you do both of those things feel free to check out our expired polls in the archive or read through the previous posts about polls here.
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April 29th, 2012 at 8:31 am
Public or private, what an employee does in their free time should have nothing to do with whether or not they are a capable employee.
While excessive drug use (or alcohol use or gambling) may very well cause an employee to perform poorly, it is not a set in stone reality.
Having been a business leader for most of my career, I have one requirement of my staff. Get your job done. If it takes 10 hours a day or 6, just get it done and do it well. If you want to go home and smoke pot, that is none of my business up to the point you stop doing your job well.
Many government employees work for the government just because that was the first guy to offer them a job. While I think they need to be held to a high standard, I don’t think they need be held to a higher standard than anyone that works for me, for example.
April 29th, 2012 at 9:46 am
I don’t think your constitutional right to privacy disappears because you work for the government. I find your position on this at odds with your libertarian views on government in general.
Is there any evidence at all that private sector drug testing has reduced the rates of employee theft, workplace violence or on the job safety that these efforts are supposed to control?
The bottom line is that drug testing is now a huge industry with likely hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars generated each year and yet there are really no credible studies that document any tangible benefits that this has achieved.
This is all about controlling certain political interests.
How else do you keep certain “out of mainstream” people with popular political appeal at bay? By leveraging their weakness with “drugs” into a social scarlet letter that will bar them from employment, and other opportunities. This has the effect of marginalizing them as a political force.
I don’t believe in drug testing for anyone, especially “suspicionless” testing. Think of how many people’s lives have been changed by a positive test. This is not to mention the false positives that happen each year. Does it make a lot of sense to throw away careers of people that actually do good work based on a random test especially because they went to a party last night and happened to smoke some herb?
It’s a another rape of our constitutional rights.
Sorry but “holding public employees to a higher standard” is just an empty catchphrase these days that most on the right like to trot out as if this will cure what ails us.
If anything, we need to be holding employees of such stellar examples of free enterprise as Lehman Brothers, AIG, et all to higher standards so they don’t steal from our pension fund and investments anymore.
Gee, I wonder if they are tested for drugs.
April 29th, 2012 at 9:57 am
N52, as you know I do not support the purchase of drugs with tax dollars (i.e. welfare recipients) and thus I would certainly extrapolate this to government workers.
Government has no place getting into the lives of its citizens. However, when you work for the government you do not deserve the same level of protection from the government that someone who doesn’t should expect. In this case, you are an employee of the government by your own choosing rather than simply being a citizen. You lose those inherent rights through that chosen association.
April 29th, 2012 at 10:29 am
Bill, the constitution applies to government employees just as much as it does to private sector employees regardless if you don’t think they deserve as much protection as them.
Why should a PS employee have to justify what they do with their disposable income?
Do you have some Orwellian vision that the government should track how PS employees spend their money down to the last penny? Talk about a nanny state!
April 29th, 2012 at 10:36 am
N52, if you sign on as a government employee (just like a private sector employee) and they state you have to submit to random drug screenings and drug screenings at the beginning of employment it’s not a violation of your constitutional rights–because it happens ALL THE TIME.
This is no different.
April 29th, 2012 at 12:26 pm
If buying drugs was legal N52 would have a better argument. But it’s not legal, so it’s really not a justified way for them to spend their disposable income.
April 29th, 2012 at 1:55 pm
Chad made my point. If they are illegal drugs they should be held to the same letter of the law. Heck look at UPS and thier drug policies, apply those to the postal service and any other government job. I also believe that people on government assistance should be drug tested even though the cases in Florida have shown less than 2% have failed testing that are on assistance. Heck, I would also go as far to say that if you are on government assistance you have no business going into a casino, buying lottery tickets etc. If you have disposable income for these activities, you do not need that amount of government assistance you are receiving.
April 29th, 2012 at 2:29 pm
In what way is an PS employee above the law?
It’s not about what they ultimately do with the money, it’s about intrusion in everyone’s private lives, something that I thought most of the people here were against.
April 29th, 2012 at 7:50 pm
Every employee at the Met Council, including interns, are drug tested. I don’t see how drug testing for other government employees would be unconstitutional, as long as the information isn’t released the public. Just like they can’t release why you are fired. Minnesota just fired a couple people who continued their Unemployment benefits after they came back to work post-shutdown. It didn’t affect their work performance, but was below what the State expects from employees in terms of professional conduct (I disagree with the firing though.)
I’m just against drug testing in general. It is a total waste of money. Since drug addiction is a disability, you cannot fire someone just for a dirty piss test. You have to allow them to sober up and go through treatment, which would be covered by the employer paid for health insurance, which would raise rates as more and more people would be forced to go. Do we really want tax payers to pay for drug treatment programs for people who smoke weed on the weekend? And as medical marijuana becomes more and more prevalent, it will become harder and harder to enforce in a lot of states.
April 29th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
I dont know the answer, but I assume these rules about not allowing drug testing do not apply to govt employees who drive things? Snow plows here in MN for example. Any number of different state trucks, vans, etc in FL?
April 29th, 2012 at 11:04 pm
What employees, public or private, do with their money, legal or illegal, is of little relevance to their employer. Should we now start monthly scans of their personal hard drives to see if they’ve downloaded any illegal music? Afterall, they did buy those computers and pay for their internet connection with money earned from the taxpayers.
April 29th, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Copyright infringement is not a criminal offense. Drug use is.
April 29th, 2012 at 11:16 pm
I’m opposed to a blanket policy of drug testing for employees. It should be allowed and perhaps even practiced if (a) there is probable cause that the employee is using illegal drugs and (b) the person’s work has a direct affect on public safety (cops, snowplow drivers, etc.) If it’s affecting the work performance generally — Bob isn’t turning in his TPS reports on time–drug use is merely the reason. Fire him for not doing his job. (Oh wait. Government employee).
As a matter of disclosure, I was a government employee for five years, a long time ago. Drug testing was not a condition of employment, though I did have to get subjected to the requirements for a security clearance.
April 30th, 2012 at 8:54 am
Bill: Copyright infringement is a criminal offense, investigatable by the FBI with a potential penalty of up to 5 years in prison and a $250,000 dollar fine. Don’t you read the warnings at the beginning of your movies?
April 30th, 2012 at 9:01 am
Heh. No. Since the movies I get from the Internet don’t seem to include those warnings ;-)
Civil penalties != Criminal.
April 30th, 2012 at 9:25 am
Is the use of government money to buy drugs no different than the use of government money to pay a speeding ticket?
I think your thought process falls flat.
April 30th, 2012 at 9:29 am
Umm speeding doesn’t have the same potential for work quality impact that drug abuse does.
April 30th, 2012 at 9:47 am
The core of the question, for me, is why should public employees be any different than private employees.
As noted, if a person is not comfortable working at an employer that does random drug testing, they should find a different job. They are free to do so, just as your employer should be free to drug test if they feel its relevant to your employment.
April 30th, 2012 at 9:49 am
Again. Rate job performance based on their ability to perform the functions necessary to do the job well. If an employee sucks, fire the employee. The outlying reason they suck at their job is not relevant.
I guarantee that there are a hell of a lot more bad workers out there because of alcohol use than there are bad employees because of drug use, and I don’t see you crying out to make people blow into a tube at midnight to ensure they don’t show up hungover.
If a DMV employee wants to snort some blow on a Friday night and I can still renew my driver’s license on Monday morning from that person, I am not sure why they would need to get fired.
April 30th, 2012 at 10:00 am
lefty,
I don’t know how familiar you are with the firing of a unionized employee but this would certainly add another item to the long and involved process that is required to do so.
April 30th, 2012 at 10:14 am
I won’t argue that with you Bill. I think unions should be banned entirely for precisely that reason. The fact that the dumbest person in the history of Twitter is somehow gainfully employed speaks volumes.
I am glad that I have spent my life of employment working for and employing people under the “at will” rules versus the idiotic bullshit that unions keep bad employees employed. That is a whole different discussion though.
Next time I see you, ask me about the story when I fired someone for lying to me. That was fucking awesome.
April 30th, 2012 at 11:08 am
The agency I work for does pre-employment drug testing, but not random drug testing afterward.
The agency requires anyone who drives an agency vehicle (or operates agency equipment) to allow their driving record to be monitored. A person with a bad driving record (in their personal vehicle) may not be allowed to drive an agency vehicle until they’ve had a defensive driving course or otherwise cleaned up their act. A DUI means the person can’t drive an agency vehicle for an extensive probationary period.
April 30th, 2012 at 11:43 am
Private sector companies generally only test employees when they join a company, and in specific situations after that (i.e. a serious injury on the job, reasonable cause, etc). Actual random drug testing is rare outside of environments where it’s done for safety reasons. I’ve never had to take a random drug test in my ten years in the private sector, though I’ve certainly taken pre-employment screening ones where they tell you up front that they’re going to do it. I’ve never used drugs, so it hasn’t been an issue for me either way.
I just don’t see where the ROI on requiring this for most public sector workers would be. I can understand it for certain jobs — for example, when I was a seasonal worker in college for the City of Lakeville, I remember the parks and streets maintenance workers did have to take random drug tests. That made sense, since they often operated heavy equipment, worked with dangerous substances, and did things where safety was extremely important. But there are a lot of jobs where it’s not needed from a safety standpoint, and thus I don’t see why taxpayer money needs to be spent on it for those workers. As others have said, if people aren’t doing their jobs due to the effects of drugs (or alcohol), it’s going to show up in other ways and action can be taken as needed.
May 6th, 2012 at 7:02 am
[...] week’s poll asked whether public employees should be subjected to more frequent drug testing. While most people voted “No”, the voting was fairly close. There was some really [...]