[BITList] To pee or not to Pee

[franka]

Hugh,
I would estimate that 98% of the jobs here require a pre-employment 
medical and most include checks for drugs and alcohol, with the way 
workers compensation insurance is set up the medical is used to set a 
base line against which future claims can be judged. Having spent the 
last 35 years working in the oil patch mostly offshore it came as a bit 
of a surprise to me when I started work back in the system here but I 
soon found that it doesn't keep the workplace drug free and the higher 
the salary's paid the worse the incidents seem to get, I'm glad I'm 
retired and out of it, But the road toll at the weekends show we are 
losing the battle, and we have to use the same roads as these idiots, 
unfortunately its big business and until we start to take it seriously 
and adopt laws like Singapore has, its only going to get worse
frank

On 9/11/2011 2:57 PM, HUGH wrote:
> Frank,
> I haven't managed to find out if it's mandatory in the UK, and I hope 
> it's not. I do get the impression, from what I see on line, that a 
> parasitical industry has grown up offering a drug vetting service to 
> employers.  I don't know anyone in employment who has been tested.  It 
> could be on a par with the situation whereby someone must go through a 
> "disclosure" procedure now, to be allowed near a child (the child not 
> being one's own) other than in all but an accidental situation (maybe 
> even then, for all I know !).  The other day I attended a "workshop" 
> in town, set up to gather public opinion on what should be the nature 
> of a proposed statue to sit in front of the Town's Buildings.  The one 
> they put up in neighbouring Greenock is a horse, and it's supposed 
> (true) to signify the town's shipbuilding past, horses having been 
> used to pull carts to and from the yards.  This was met with 
> incredulity, notwithstanding it's a beautiful statue, hence the 
> introduction of consultations for Port Glasgow.  It looks like we will 
> get the skeletal bow of a ship with stainless steel bow wave.  But I 
> digress.  As seems to be the norm nowadays, local school children were 
> roped in to provide ideas - based, one assumes, on their memories of 
> shipbuilding - and to get into the place I had to go through a room 
> full of schoolchildren and their shepherds. I was escorted through 
> it to a back room where, behind a shut door with the other 
> unvetted adults, I took part in a discussion.  What shit, and the 
> notion of general workplace drug testing comes from the same stable. I 
> was once told I had to attend a meeting with "the company doctor" over 
> some dispute about time off for illness.  Some rule was quoted to me. 
> So I attended.  "Are you a doctor?" I asked him when we were seated 
> facing each other on the firm's premises.  He said he was.  "Are you 
> the company doctor?" I asked. He said he wasn't (the company didn't 
> have a doctor, as I well knew).  "Why am I here?" I asked him.  He 
> didn't know, and I didn't know. So I left.  That sort of thing 
> - self-certification had just been introduced - was the start of the 
> intrusion of employment law into private life.  Did we but know it, 
> Elfin Bloody Safety was on the horizon.  Well-meaning ideas turned 
> into self-perpetuating authoritarian industries.
> Hugh.
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