The Orlando Sentinel
December 24, 2007
Alex Silva remembers the day well. He was a pack-a-day smoker in the fall of 2002 when his boss told him the news: One year hence, Silva and every other CFI Westgate Resort employee in Florida would be prohibited from smoking -- not just on the job or on Westgate property, but anywhere, any time.
Silva, a manager in the time-share company's marketing department, loved his job and had a family to support. He immediately started working out more and smoking less.
Shortly before the Westgate smoking ban took effect on Sept. 1, 2003, Silva smoked his last ultra light.
Quitting cigarettes "was very hard," recalled Silva, 33, who doubts he would have made the effort if he hadn't been forced into it. "It was the company's decision. I knew I had no more options, and this will be good for me."
Westgate's hard-line policy on smoking is unusual only in its reach. While the Florida Clean Indoor Act already has all but banished smoking from the immediate workplace, more and more employers are extending the ban to anywhere on their property while also aggressively promoting smoking-cessation programs.
Local examples include Florida Hospital, Orlando Regional Healthcare and Health Central, which together employ roughly 38,000 employees. They jointly announced last month they would ban smoking anywhere on their properties beginning next summer. Lockheed Martin (NYSE:LMT) , with 7,500 workers in Central Florida, imposed a campus-wide ban at its facilities at the beginning of this year.
Bans aren't the only anti-smoking weapons available to employers. With irrefutable evidence that smokers as a group have higher health costs, more employers are considering the idea of charging higher health-insurance premiums to their workers who smoke.
It's legal, and at least two large employers in Central Florida have already taken that step.
Financial-services giant JPMorgan Chase (NYSE:JPM PRH) (NYSE:JPM PRX) (NYSE:JPM PRK) (NYSE:JPM PRJ) (NYSE:JPT) (NYSE:JPM) , which has more than 1,700 employees in Central Florida, this year imposed an additional health-insurance premium on workers who smoke -- reportedly $30 a pay period.
And starting in January, Tribune Co., owner of the Orlando Sentinel, will charge employees who use tobacco products an extra $100 a month for their health insurance.
Penalizing smokers with higher insurance premiums is still viewed by most employers as too much of a morale-buster, but that's going to change, predicted Becky Cherney, who speaks for many of the region's largest employers as president of the Florida Health Care Coalition.
"Employers are saying they can no longer afford to subsidize bad behavior," Cherney said. "We've known for a long time that smoking is hazardous to health, and people are still smoking. Education hasn't worked; [smoking-]cessation programs haven't worked. You have to make the individual pay for the bad habit."
Even a leading critic of hard-line employer smoking policies accepts that logic. Smokers do have higher health-care costs, and "it's not unfair to make you pay for the extra costs you've created," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute in Princeton, N.J.
'It goes on and on'
But it's still a dangerous road, Maltby said, noting that obesity is rapidly overtaking smoking as America's most costly health-care problem. "Are you going to make fat people pay more, or those of us who have dangerous hobbies like skiing or hang gliding? It goes on and on. Pretty soon, your employer knows everything about your private life in order to save on health-care costs."
Maltby's bigger concern is the total smoking ban, which he views as a fundamental civil- rights issue, since it extends beyond the workplace into an individual's home. He notes that 29 states and the District of Columbia have so-called lifestyle-rights laws that protect employees' rights to smoke when they're not at work.
But not Florida. "When I found out it was legal to discriminate against smokers [in 2002], those were my marching orders," said Westgate's chief executive, David Siegel, who gave his tobacco-using employees a year's notice before the total ban went into effect.
Siegel said he had tried everything else -- banning smoking from sales rooms, offering a host of smoking-cessation programs, lecturing just about any smoker he encountered on the wisdom of quitting. The most effective previous move, he said, was in 2000, when Westgate doubled employees' share of health-insurance premiums but gave non-smokers a 50 percent credit.
"It meant smokers would pay twice as much for their health insurance as non-smokers. Immediately, 40 people stopped smoking," he said, shaking his head at what he views as foolishness. "People stop for monetary reasons. Why isn't health enough of a reason?"
But not all of his employees stopped, even with the higher premiums. Westgate's total smoking ban, now more than 4 years old, "has been a win-win for everybody," Siegel said. Since 2003, health-insurance premiums for the company and its employees have been going up by 5 percent or less a year, far below the rate increases of most other employers, and this year premiums will rise by less than 3 percent.
Siegel, who says his brief flirtation with cigarettes ended in 1959, is so strongly opposed to the habit that he would like to see smoking banned completely. Short of that, he hopes his company's smoking ban -- effective in Florida and every other Westgate location where it's allowed by state law -- becomes a model for other employers.
"I'm shocked we're the only ones," he said. "Probably 90 percent of companies don't know you can do this."
One notable exception is Weyco Inc., a small Michigan health-benefits company that gained national attention when it imposed a total smoking ban on its employees in 2005.
A problem for morale?
But it's not just ignorance that keeps companies from emulating Westgate and Weyco. Employers are increasingly offering their workers smoking-cessation programs, but regulating a legal off-duty behavior is too far a stretch for most companies, said Kay Wolf, a labor-and-employment lawyer with Ford & Harrison in Orlando.
"Employers realize it's a morale problem for the 20 to 25 percent of people who smoke," she said. "Once you get past all the [positive] ways to get them to stop, employers look at [smoking bans] and say, 'We're not going there.' "
CSX Transportation, which has nearly 4,000 workers in Jacksonville and roughly 200 in Central Florida, is giving the positive approach as aggressive a push as it can.
In-house surveys show that more than a third of its employees use tobacco products and 27 percent smoke cigarettes. "The national average is 20 percent -- we're about 7 percent high," said Kenneth Glover, the company's director of health and wellness.
This year, the company moved its smoking areas further from employee walkways, but it has not considered harsher measures such as higher health-care premiums or outright bans, Glover said.
Instead, the company has been offering free health screenings to workers for the past two years and has identified thousands of smokers. Those who express an interest in quitting are given an array of options, typically starting with a visit to a doctor, and the company helps pay for smoking-cessation drugs and nicotine-replacement therapies.
"It takes the average smoker six to nine attempts to stop. We subsidize up to six quit attempts," said Glover, adding that each attempt may cost the company as much as $400.
It's a big investment, he acknowledges, "but we've looked at one cost model, and the potential saving for us is about $2.3 million a year."
Paid help isn't common
Maltby, of the National Workrights Institute, said only one of four U.S. companies pays for smoking-cessation programs. Most "won't pay for classes; they won't give employees time to go to classes; they won't even pay for the [nicotine] patch. They haven't tried the voluntary approach," he said.
And while few companies have gone the punitive route, Maltby said, "If you talk to people in the corporate health business, they'll tell you it's coming."
Dale Maloney, a Maitland health-insurance broker, thinks so. "Fifty to 70 percent of health-care costs are predicated on poor behavior," he said. "All employers are looking at what they can do to assist their employees in behavioral changes to bring down the cost of health-care."
That may mean higher health premiums for smokers, or even the Westgate model, which worked for Tania Cachia.
Cachia, 23, joined Westgate a couple of years ago, after the total ban had been imposed. She had heard about an opening in the company's marketing department that sounded right for her. Then she heard about the smoking ban.
"I quit the day before my interview," Cachia recalled. "I was nervous; I was still in withdrawal. I told the recruiter, 'I'm sorry, but I just quit smoking,' and he said, 'OK, you're hired.' "
Quitting was tough, she said, "but it really helped working in an environment where nobody smokes."
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