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The drugs education charity Release has reported a fivefold increase in calls about drug testing at work, prompting fears that firms are looking for excuses to get rid of staff without having to make redundancy payouts, as a way of cutting costs during the recession.
In the first three months of 2008, the charity received 493 calls, with just 31 (6.2%) related to testing at work. This compares with the same period this year, where 548 calls were received with 145 (26.4%) related to this issue.
Most calls were from employees worried about the implementation of testing by an employer where no such testing procedure had existed before. In some cases the employee had been in the same role for many years without ever having been subjected to a random drugs test. Release has voiced concerns that there appears to be a tactic by employers of announcing a programme of voluntary redundancies, followed by workplace medicals for the remaining staff, including a drug test.
Executive director of Release, Sebastian Saville, said: "This is a worrying practice that may well breach employees' human rights and their rights to privacy.
"[Employers] should be supporting any staff who might be experiencing drug problems, not using it as an excuse to make cheap redundancies."
Twenty-two percent of employers who responded to a recent survey “Managing Drug and Alcohol Misuse at Work”, by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), said that they regularly carried out drug and alcohol testing. However, the law in this area is complex. Testing "for cause", where an employee is tested because of their involvement in an accident or other workplace incident, is more common, and is acceptable in a range of situations. However, a policy of carrying out random drug tests is likely only to be suitable where employees are working in safety critical roles.
The practice is far more common in the US where nearly half of all private companies require employees to submit to random drug and alcohol testing, even making a part of their recruitment process. UK companies are beginning to adopt the procedure, possibly because it reduces insurance premiums.
It is recommended that employees and employers alike seek legal advice on the issue but in general, a firm should have a written policy on drug testing and communicate it along with its hiring and firing policy fully. At time of employment, the company shoul include a clause to the contract of employment about drug and alcohol testing. In the case of random testing, if it is deemed appropriate to the nature of the role in the first place, it should be genuinely done randomly.
Expansion of workplace drug testing in the UK
Concateno, a provider of drugs and alcohol testing kits, reported that its statistics show that the demand for drug and alcohol tests in the UK have risen by nearly a fifth in the first half of 2008, with employers requesting over 100,000 workplace tests to be carried out.
The government drug awareness campaign Frank admits that the scal of the problem is massive. It estimates that forty per cent of the workforce under 40 have used illicit drugs. Although it is uncertain how many users are adversely affected by drug misuse during working hours.
While drug testing in safety-critical industries has been common for many years, the expansion into areas of work that do not involve clear health and safety issues like office work and desk jobs could be in breach of employees' human rights and entitlement to a private life. However, as research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development has indicated that employers believe that up to a third of absenteeism is due to drug or alcohol misuse, business may have strong case for wanting information on what people do in their own time.
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