Employee Drug Testing--Issues Facing Private Sector Employers
Steven O'Neal Todd · University of North Carolina School of Law Scholarship Repository (University of North Carolina Hospitals) · 1987
What do IBM, Boeing, General Motors, Ford Motor Company, Alcoa, Boise Cascade, Toyota, Greyhound Lines, and American Airlines have in common?Each of these companies currently uses drug testing to screen either current or potential employees, or both. 1 They are not alone.Approximately 25 percent of the Fortune 500 companies are now using drug tests on employees, 2 an increase of 250 percent in just three years.3 Dr.Michael Walsh of the National Institute on Drug Abuse predicts that number will double in the coming year.4 But as more and more companies implement drug testing programs, some lawyers are predicting that employers will encounter an increasing number of legal challenges.5 For example, San Francisco Supervisor Bill Maher, who co-sponsored that city's ordinance prohibiting drug screening except in cases of public safety, predicts that "[iut's going to be a major [national] battle over privacy and what corporate America can do to employees."6 To understand why so many employers are turning to drug testing, one need look no further than the statistics on drug abuse in the United States.According to a survey by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, between ten and twenty-three percent of all workers use drugs at work.7 Ninety percent of people who use cocaine use it during work hours and approximately one-half actually buy and sell the drug while on the job.8 The report concluded: " '[D]rug abuse is the most common health hazard in the American workplace.'" The results of on-the-job impairment can be staggering-and deadly.The costs to industry in lost productivity from employee drug and alcohol abuse is estimated at 100 billion dollars in 1986.10Furthermore, over a nine-year period drug and alcohol use was implicated in thirty-seven deaths in the railroad industry.IIFor more and more employers the answer to the drug problem is drug testing, often by urinalysis, of current employees, applicants for employment, or both.The introduction of the EMIT test has made drug testing by means of urinalysis a simpler and less expensive process, 12 contributing to the growing