“If a delivery associate is impaired at work and tests positive post-accident or due to reasonable suspicion, that person would no longer be permitted to perform services for Amazon,” she said.
If you were under the impression that Amazon & other companies are actually screening for cannabis use, you should realize that in any legal state they basically did everything they could to make sure their employees would not test positive. It's extremely hard to find people that would work minimum wage and are completely weed/drug free - especially if you need young, physically fit workers. Having higher turnover because you have to fire people after a while because of a drug test just means you have less experienced drivers.
It's funny that, as the article points out, school bus driver jobs would outbid Amazon since that means that schools are having the same issue but really have no choice when it comes to drug testing and are generally more restrictive.
To get the contract you must be the lowest bidder. In order to do that you need to pay drivers as little as possible. Raising wages means losing money.
I do not smoke anything as a personal preference and do not enjoy when second-hand smoke and smell affects me but I support legalization for the simple reason that criminalization of marijuana and stigmatization of pot smokers is much much worse.
This is an extension of prison labor.
Work in prisons is often not optional, and if it is the inmate may not earn "good behavior" time if they choose not to work. It also averages something like $0.60/hour across the country.
I don't think $17/hour & mandatory sobriety are anything close to prison labor, but I will grant you that it isn't consistent or fair to fire someone that tests positive for marijuana if they weren't high at the time of the accident. Is there a way to test if someone is currently high on weed vs. has simply had some recently?
You lost me with that hyperbole. I fail to see how you can equate voluntarily working for a company earning at least minimum wage and other benefits, as "prison labor".
But I stay away from the hard shit, like alcohol.
Hippie speedball.
It's not a labor shortage, it's just a correction in the price of labor
I mean, sure, Amazon can raise their wages to compete, and then we run out of... school bus drivers? I'm not sure that's any better.
At a point, you either need to increase the labor pool (by pulling people out of unemployment, retirement, etc) or seriously automate the profession, and we're just not there with delivery services right now.
Maybe they've just bought in to someone elses' worldview. But I don't think so.
Edit: Regulate as in drug testing for past use in an employment context, like what the story is talking about.
Yes we do. And it's a cash cow for the government so we're unlikely to stop anytime soon.
My main guess for that special treatment is merely that tobacco and alcohol were global when we started taking care about global health issues, so we left them, but banned any newcomer
And I don't know if companies do it but I know that monitoring Gamma GT levels of suspected alcoholics is a thing. It is a problem for those who have naturally elevated levels btw.
What is unfortunate is that we don't have a good test for cannabis-related impairment. It is quite reliable for alcohol BAC is easy to test and correlates with impairment, but for cannabis, you don't really know if a person is completely stoned or if he has sobered up.
But yeah, cannabis use is less tolerated than alcohol use, cultural reasons I guess. Plus, it is really difficult to control alcohol since pretty much anyone can turn staple food into alcohol at home.
Alcohol is one of the most highly regulated substances on the planet.
Also, no puritanism here, just facts about how people can use pot and remain completely in control (again, worth pointing out that someone can fail a pot drug test if they smoked it weeks ago)
But I have worked with many frequent users who smoked daily, and their job. They didn't mind doing terrible jobs.
I'm suprised people arn't talking about habitual pot smokers vs. occasional. If used to smoking--it's no big deal.
Same with alcohol. An alcoholic can drive perfectly well at .08, or a bit higher. An occasional drinker probally shouldn't be drinking and driving.
I heard TX takes into account tolerance when prosecuting DUI's.
I'm not sure what the point of your comment is though, as I don't think anyone is suggesting that these drivers will actually be high while driving. Rather, they are people that use marijuana recreationally and would test positive for THC, disqualifying them from many jobs (despite the fact that urine THC levels do not corelate with how "high" someone is).
It's easy to get distracted and then focus on that distraction while high. That's not conducive to safe driving. We don't want people mindlessly blowing through an intersection because they were fixating on how the wind was making the tarp on the truck in front of them flutter.
It is very comparable to being drunk. Some people can in fact handle it, many cannot and severely overestimate their abilities.
The only good thing was it was at 3AM so there was no one around on a normally busy street to get wiped out.
And your whole attitude of irrational justification of it says you’re probably not capable of making a rational judgement about whether or not you should drive.
Could be better informed by numbers here. But hard to say because there aren't reliable tests for "high right now", and maybe not for "tired" either.
https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/public-policy/artic...
some of the highest performers I have ever worked with, and pot was a daily for them.
Maybe the question has a different outcome if you're measuring a stadium full of Designers with Adobe Illustrator open, trying to brainstorm how a logo looks?
I know this is unpopular on internet news sites but I assure you that your social reputation isn’t that great if you smoke the stuff generally and that’s not going to change because of the propensity of people to be unreliable or dicks. The only thing that’s faulty is your perception of it.
Also, any shortage is entirely self inflicted from offering poor wages.
False, at least where I am.
I learned to drive school bus, and they drug tested my class before we were allowed to test, and every month, there were random drug tests.
I quit after 1.5 days because of the stress and the constant push to get kids to school on time over safety.
Yeah! All the millennials who can't buy a home are just self-inflected by not bidding high enough! Government policy certainly didn't' contribute to either!
Based on their 2020 profits, they can pay more. $20B in profits, 170,000 deliverers worldwide. They could take 10% of that and pay those folks an average of about $10,000 more/year.
They have the money, so if their business suffers at all as a result of too few drivers, then it's absolutely self-inflicted.
Other delivery companies are continuing to screen applicants, concerned about the insurance and liability implications in the many states where weed use remains illegal. […]
“If one of my drivers crashes and kills someone and tests positive for marijuana, that’s my problem, not Amazon’s,” said one
Amazon is just looking out for Number One and to hell with their so-called “partners.” This isn’t anything new.
If I were an ADA prosecuting such a case, I’d charge Amazon as a co-conspirator.
The drug testing requirement for delivery drivers isn’t necessarily a moral imperative from management. It’s a condition of their insurance requirements. The article touches on this:
> Other delivery companies are continuing to screen applicants, concerned about the insurance and liability implications in the many states where weed use remains illegal.
No tech job has ever even mentioned it.
Specifically, if it's known that these jobs test for Marijuana use, you're cutting off the portion of the applicant pool that knows this but still uses anyway, which stochastically reduces the likelihood that a candidate will eg show up to work intoxicated (fwiw, I'm a big fan of marijiana: I use it regularly, am a commensurately lighter drinker relative to my peers, and I'm pretty sure I'm making the right choice in terms of health and responsibility)
Like I said, it's an arbitrary bar and a path-dependent one, and a counterfactual equilibrium in which alcohol or another intoxicant was tested for would work just as well. But it's not irrational for employers to use it in certain labor market conditions. There are analogues in other labor markets, like requiring a college degree to be a firefighter; the false positive rate only really starts to matter if you start finding it difficult to find qualified applicants.
Tech jobs, by contrast, already have plenty of bars that their employees need to clear. In this context, any candidates swept up in blunt drug tests are likely to be false positives, and the use of the bar is a net negative for the employer.
Thus if it's determined that people need a certain reaction time to drive safely, that could be one thing tested.
Clearly setting the levels and the particular capabilities might well be contentious, but by aligning the test(s) with what's needed for the task it's fairer and in certain ways more robust: for instance, you could be under the threshold for alcohol/cannabis but if you combine that with legal medicines that cause drowsiness or simply happen to be extremely sleep deprived, you might pass a traditional test but the combined effects would lead one to fail a capability test.
It also helps in other ways too, such as fairly treating older people - you might be a sharp 75 year old and yet come up against some age limit. This let's you continue so long as you maintain the capabilities. Then if things start to change it's clear and takes some of the awkwardness out of the discussion about whether one is still fit for a job.
Of course the risk is that people are pseudoscientific or arbitrary in setting the capabilities to a level that doesn't align. We've all seen the unrealistic hiring prerequisites that managers ask for if left to decide (must have ten years experience of XYZ!) In the wrong hands these could be used unfairly (eg setting totally unrealistic levels precisely to screen out groups they don't want).
from https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/mari...
I wonder how much marijuana actually contributes to crashes. I think people can certainly get too high to drive, but unlike alcohol which lowers inhibitions, being 'too high' could even increase inhibitions somewhat (more anxiety, paranoia), so I'd expect people too high to drive are much less likely to get behind the wheel than drunk people. I certainly buy that 0.1% BAC + marijuana is probably worse than 0.1% BAC alone, but I'm curious what a just legal limit would be in comparison to 0.08% BAC regulations. What BTHCC produces equivalent impairment to 0.08% BAC, and how does that interact with THC tolerance?
Are people who consume thc multiple times per day worse drivers than people who never consume thc, when both groups are sober? I'd imagine there is a tolerance effect where stoned frequent-users are better drivers than stoned infrequent-users.
Would be interesting to try to make a cabinet arcade-style driving game that would accurately predict actual-road driving ability. Could even be used as a tool to demonstrate the dangers of drunk driving by putting it into bars and letting people try when above the legal limit (definitely some dangers of giving people good scores when they perform well while drunk though...)
Pot is radioactive for many employers because insurance discounts and employment regulations are stuck in the "Refer Madness" era (Refer Madness was a propaganda film about the dangers of pot). So, employers face two surprises: increasing liability, workers comp and other insurance AND potentially, "hi we're from a government agency and under regulation XYZ 202 sub paragraph 293888 you need to drug test and immediately fire those that flunk or we will fine you. Have a happy day!"
Do you mean to imply or assume that 50-somethings are unfamiliar with marijuana? It was already common for Baby Boomers, who are older than that.
What happens is that open-minded, pot-smoking 20-somethings think 50-somethings are close-minded and ignorant. Then 30 years later many of those 20-somethings are the exact same as their predecessors. Instead of dismissing the older generation, the 20-somethings might consider how they will avoid that fate.
Reading between the lines, the exec is trying to hire more workers for their factory, and wants to know if they can stop testing for marijuana so they'll be able to hire more workers. To which the poster, who has recurring experience with this issue, must (unfortunately) recommend against it because of the reasons they enumerate.
Or maybe it was just a close-minded, ignorant ageist comment. Better to assume positive intent though.
the drunk driver runs the red light, and the stoner keeps waiting for the stop sign to turn green!
The drunk driver will tell you that they're basically sober, and will be shocked when everyone can tell from their behavior that they're drunk.
The stoned driver will tell you how stoned they are, and will be concerned that everyone else on the street can tell from their behavior.
(These are, of course, broad generalizations. There will be exceptions.)
Anybody else think they meant 420% ?
For delivery drivers, it's a terrible idea. Driving large vehicles around people's neighborhoods while high is dangerous. It's a negative externality Amazon is recklessly putting onto the public.
Cue mental gymnastics of potheads claiming they actually drive better while stoned.
As long as they're not high/drunk when they're working, what's the issue?
Who cares if they smoke pot when not working. We don't need high/impaired people on the road.
Edit for clarifying: maybe a $200 fine is good point for starting, go up to $500 with repeating. I also think many smoker drop cigarette butts and we need greater fine for that if it will stop.
Jogging in the park and inhaling pot constantly is getting really annoying. I know a number of families that moved to the burbs, and one of the reasons they voiced is the sharp increase is pot smell/smoke in the kids' playgrounds.
We should aalso inflict "consequence" on the SUV drivers who clog the roads in the town I live in; I have medically-compromised lungs, so the stink of diesel fumes isn't just an annoyance for me.
Let's also punish people who use wood-fired stoves in built-up areas. I live in a smoke-controlled zone, but for some reason builders are allowed to install these stoves in new-build homes, provided the model of stove meets certain standards. Well, that's cool; if the stove itself is safe, it must be the owner, operating it incorrectly. So let's give them some consequence too.
These offences aren't much like smoking a ciggie, which last about 7 minutes; the amount of fumes produced by a ICE per minute is much greater than that produced by a smoker, and the ICE generally runs for much longer than 7 minutes. Wood-fired stoves are normally run continuously for several hours, and not for heat; they are used to generate a nostalgic and aesthetic effect. If that harms others, or even if it just creates a bad smell, let's be harsh.
I'm also keen to impose "harsh consequence" on dog owners who allow their dog to deposit smelly stuff at my front gate, and who then fail to pick up that shit and take it away with them. This is a particular problem if you get a 3-week cold snap; 3 weeks-worth of dogshit all thaws at the same time, and the smell of dogshit coming out of deep-freeze pervades entire neighbourhoods. And of course, pot-smoke doesn't contain toxoplasmosis.
Do you fart in public? Should your butt be plugged in public too?
It is antisocial behaviour, has a health impact and needs to have a consequence.
