Safety-Sensitive

You know it's an election year when the Florida legislature has passed and the Pennsylvania legislature is considering a bill to require welfare recipients to be tested for drugs. "We are not letting your hard-earned tax dollars be used to support freeloaders' drug habits!" "Your employer requires that you pee in the bottle. Why not make welfare recipients do the same?" "We will clean the welfare rolls of druggies and it won't cost us much because we will require those freeloaders to pay for the drug tests and only recompense them if they pass."

Sounds great, doesn't it?

The problem is that you cannot legislate morality (Prohibition worked so well back in the '20s, didn't it?) and people will always find a way to scam the system. Only 2% of Florida's tests came back positive. Welfare rolls remained at the same levels, and the program ended up costing millions for the compensated drug tests. That part probably won't be included in anyone's campaign literature.

Drug testing may not minimize governmental expenditures on welfare, but it does have some value in the private sector. When Air Products began drug testing in the mid-80s, the stated rationale was to improve safety. We must prevent a drug-addled driver from crashing a trailer full of liquid hydrogen into a Pre-School. It would be worse than the Hindenburg Disaster. We can't have a plant operator sleeping off a heroin fix while the scrub tower runs dry and the resultant hydrogen chloride cloud wafts over a nearby Nursing Home. It would be worse than Obamacare's Death Panel for Granny. We must have a Drug Testing Program. Of course, it will be limited to those in "safety-sensitive positions."

As a pencil-pushing engineer, I was flattered when I was marched off (with no advance notice) for my first drug test. "Wow, the company thinks that I have to power to cause an industrial disaster. I must be important." Then I noticed that the line at the Health Unit included a girl from the steno pool and even the guy whose sole job seemed to be using a feather duster on the potted plants. If I miscalculated the required ventilation rate for a toxic gas storage facility, it could be a big problem, so I guess I had a "safety-sensitive position", but a few misspellings on a specification or dust on the ficus in the corner were not going to pack Emergency Rooms near our facilities.

It turned out that everyone was in a "safety-sensitive position" and the true value of Drug Testing came out when it became the basis for the company's defense against lawsuits for unlawful termination. "Your honor, the plaintiff may claim that he was released from his position as Senior Ficus Duster so I could hire my nephew in his place, but it is a safety-sensitive position and his drug test indicates that he smoked marijuana three months ago."

To minimize the welfare rolls and save that drug testing compensation, all the government has to do is hire the unemployed temporarily, designate their positions as "safety-sensitive", and fire them. Mitt Romney is right. Government can learn a lot from the private sector.