URINE MY WORKPLACE

The problem with employer-required urine tests is not just that they're an
invasion of privacy, but also that they don't get at their rightful target,
which is work-related functions such as seeing, hearing, speech clarity,
alertness, reaction time, hand-eye coordination, manual dexterity, and
decision-making.

Work-related functions can be affected by a number of factors besides those
detectable in urine screens - for example, legal drugs, hunger, illness,
fatigue, and emotional upset.

Even law-abiding employees can unwittingly be affected by such
factors. Today's long shifts (beyond eight hours) and heavy overtime are
big contributors to on-the-job mistakes, including accidents. Expertise
exists to identify and measure critical work capabilities and to test for
them, for example by the use of work task simulations analogous to
simulations used to train pilots.

In my view, people in safety-critical occupations, such as pilots; drivers
of buses, trains (sic) and trucks; air-traffic controllers; patient-care
personnel; and operators of cranes, forklifts, heavy equipment, and other
hazardous machinery, can fairly be tested with such simulations or other
scientifically-validated tests regularly and frequently. For simple
productivity, employers may test important work-related capabilities before
hiring, so long as they test everyone uniformly. And they can always
directly measure productivity of existing employees to make sure everyone
is keeping up; there is no need for drug tests.

Workers should be evaluated on what they do not what they ingest. But it's
a lot cheaper and less effort just to throw a urine test at the issue, isn't it?