No smoking for *you*!

[pne]

I asked K and S at work today what the plans are for smokers in the new office building we plan to move into in March, and they said that the current plan is not to have any smoking areas on the floor we'd be moving into: people who would like to smoke would have to go ten floors down and outside, presumably.

One reason, they said, why they were considering this was that at least two people had said that they would like to quit smoking but it's too convenient when smokers tend to hang out on the office floor. Another was that it's easier to set up a smoking area if the burden seems too harsh after a while than to disallow smoking after it's been permitted for a while.

No smoking on the entire floor is just fine with me (though I hope I won't have to "run the gauntlet" through a huge cloud of smoke when entering and leaving the main building from smokers clustered just outside the door).

Comments

[bride.livejournal.com]

They should actually designate a smoking area at the back entrance or a service entrance only. It's terribly unprofessional for clients or external people to have a bunch of people loitering and smoking at the front door as their first impression of the company.

[bacskocky.livejournal.com]

Where I work now they make the employees move away from teh building to smoke. And my first job made peopel smoke out back.

[ladyortyger.livejournal.com]

I *hate* that cloud of smoke.

BLECH.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

As long as the smokers area is covered, and moderately well-protected from the wind, then it can be away from the front door. If, on the other hand, it isn't, and the front door is, then people *will* smoke at the front door when it rains.

If an employer fails to provide appropriate facilities, they have to accept that the facilities they do provide will be used inapproriately.

[pne.livejournal.com]

Well... I'm tempted to ask when smoking became a human right that employers have to accommodate. Though I kind of see that that kind of position is not particularly tenable, but it still feels... wrong, somehow.

[darth-spacey.livejournal.com]

Well, it's not a protected right. However, nothing anyone does or says is going to stop people smoking, and if they don't have somewhere appropriate to do it, they'll do it somewhere inappropriate. That's just a fact of life. Of course, the company could decide to hire non-smokers only, but I'll bet a lot of places have privacy in employment laws that would stop that.