WANTED: Someone to do clerical work while sitting next to a chain-smoking fellow employee; the successful candidate will agree to inhale clouds of second-hand smoke, a known carcinogen, during the work day and not whine when he or she gets sick and his or her clothing reeks of cigarette smoke at the end of the day; complaining could bring termination.
So it's an exaggeration. But in essence that's what employers who allow employees to smoke on the job are doing -- allowing a handful of people (only 25 percent of the adult population still smokes) to subject everyone they work or come in contact with to a life-threatening substance.
No employer in his right mind would allow someone with a contagious and possibly fatal disease to expose his employees to that disease day after day. They wouldn't let their employees toy with a chain saw at their desk or spritz tear gas in the air or set things on fire because they were bored or had a nicotine fit.
But because the tobacco industry has spent millions and millions to frame this as a "smokers' rights" issue and not what it really is -- a health issue -- and because so many people have fallen for that malarkey, untold thousands of northern Michigan residents still go to work every day to suck in someone else's second-hand smoke.
If we had any sense, it would be considered assault with a deadly weapon.
Thankfully, enough Benzie and Leelanau County commissioners didn't fall for the rhetoric of "individual choice" and recently voted to ban smoking in indoor workplaces. They join a long and growing list of Michigan counties and cities that have banned smoking in workplaces as a public health issue.
The Leelanau County Board of Commissioners approved the measure last month and Benzie County leaders did the same in July.
Bill Crawford, health officer with the Benzie-Leelanau District Health Department, framed it perfectly. "My belief is that anytime we can make a workplace safer, then we've done an important job," he said.
And make no doubt, this is, first and last, a safety issue.
Not everyone agrees, of course.
Benzie County Commissioner Kristin Hollenbeck, a smoker who cast the lone no vote against the new Benzie ordinance, offered the same old argument. "It's a government intrusion on free enterprise and the rights of the individual to smoke," she said.
That totally ignores, of course, the right of non-smokers to not smoke and not be subjected to someone else's habit. Ed Beuerle, owner of Northern Lumber Company in Suttons Bay, offered a simple solution: "If people want to smoke, they can walk outside and smoke."
What's so hard about that?
Smoking ban opponents often say it should be an individual's choice whether to frequent businesses where smoking is allowed, another Big Tobacco argument. But purposely forgotten are the people who work there and choose not to smoke but are forced to swallow clouds of the stuff every day.
Smokers don't have any more rights than anyone else. But the very act of lighting up at work says, "My right to smoke trumps your right to breathe clean air."
How did things get so twisted that we buy that stuff?
Benzie and Leelanau joined Antrim, Emmet and Otsego counties, plus Traverse City, in enacting bans.
In Leelanau County, where the new law passed 4-3, dissenter Melinda Lautner said the law seems to dictate what businesses can and can't do.
And she's right. It says, simply enough, that businesses can't let some employees threaten the health of other employees on the job. How can that possibly be a problem?
