Well, how else does one get company-permitted 15 minute breaks throughout the day?
This is indeed one of the great incentives to beginning a habit that otherwise would seem to have nothing but disadvantages. Dr. Boli has spoken with many in the working classes who tell him the same story: they started smoking because the place where they worked allowed smokers frequent time off throughout the day, whereas no such provision was made for any activity other than smoking.
Is smoking, alone among vices, regarded as so virtuous that employees who smoke ought to be encouraged with special privileges?
Incidentally, if our readers will pardon a digression, the managers who permit smoking breaks have come perilously close to making a paradigm-shifting discovery. They allow the breaks because experience has taught them that their smoking employees are generally no less productive than their non-smoking employees. But they close their eyes to the obvious conclusion: that most employees produce as much benefit to the company whether they are working or not. You may make of this digression what you will; now back to the main subject.
It is well known that smoking shortens the productive life of workers, but since there is no long term in American business, employers do not care whether their employees live beyond the end of the current quarter. We may therefore remove health from the potential arguments against smoking in the workplace. However, it is true that smoking costs employees a large part of their paychecks, which in turn might induce them to demand higher paychecks. That is the sort of risk an American business-school graduate can understand. Therefore, it would be to the advantage of most businesses to eliminate the privileged status of smoking, if not the habit itself.
Dr. Boli has two suggestions for managers. The first is to count the hours in a day the average smoker spends not working because of the tobacco habit. Let us say that the breaks add up to an hour and a half a day. Then we simply make a policy that is fair and equal to smokers and non-smokers. You may take your smoking breaks throughout the day, or you may leave an hour and a half earlier in the afternoon.
But that would strike most managers as drastic. The idea of giving employees more time at home with their families, even if it could be proved that it would make them more productive when they were working, would cause the average business-school graduate to break out in hives. So we have an alternate suggestion. Employees who do not smoke may be permitted an equal number of breaks to indulge in some other vice of their choice. We might call them “booze breaks,” although we would not force employees to drink alcoholic beverages if they have no taste for them. Some employees might use the breaks for online gambling; others might read comic books; others might try to sell each other Amway distributorships. Whatever vice they came up with, it would probably not be as destructive as smoking; and thus by being equally hospitable to all vices, we eliminate the incentive to indulge in one in particular.