Where There's Smoke, They're Fired

April 8, 2005 — -- If you don't like your job, you can quit. Does it work the other way? Can my boss quit me if he doesn't like, say, something I do at home? An employer in Michigan has done that, and it's making lots of people say Give Me a Break.

Howard Weyers runs WEYCO, a health-care benefits company in Okemos, Mich., and he's a health nut.

He's 71 years old, but still lifts heavy weights. One day, he decided his employees should be healthy too. First, he hired an in-house private trainer. Any employee who goes to see her and then meets certain exercise goals can earn a $110 bonus per month.

Mindy Tiraboschi, one of his employees, thinks it's great. "He wants to help us be as healthy as we can," she said.

"I want to be a good influence on my employees. What's wrong with being healthy?" Weyers said.

Two years ago, he went further after concluding that smokers run up higher medical costs and are less healthy in general. He introduced a smoking policy, telling his employees, "You're not going to smoke if you work here. Period."

He was not just talking about smoking at work, but smoking anywhere -- even at home. He would do random tests and fire anyone with nicotine in their blood.

Anita Epolito and some other workers were furious that day when Weyers told them, you have 15 months to stop smoking. "No patch, no gum, you had to either been completely you know, just healed from tobacco, or you're not working at Weyco," she said.

Weyers said he took a lot of flak from his workers when he announced the policy. "I just let them attack me. I had 200 people in a room and they went at me," he said.

Epolito was one of the people who let him have it. "Immediately, when he said it, I yelled out in the meeting, you can't do that to me, it's against the law," she said.

But Weyers' company is located in one of 20 states that allow employers to fire anyone as long as they don't violate discrimination laws for things like age, gender, race or disabilities. Of the 24 Weyco employees who smoked, most stopped.