|
The Fascination With
Urine
Issue: March, 2000
The fascination
with urine remains undimmed through the ages. Until the arrival of
scientific medicine, physicians subjected it to careful visual
scrutiny, expecting the color and clarity to reveal an exact
diagnosis. Today, it's the corporate class that seems transfixed by
the predictive powers of piss: 80 percent of large employers insist
on testing job applicants' urine--or occasionally hair or blood--for
damning traces of illegal substances. You can be the best qualified
applicant in all other ways, but if your urine speaks against you,
you're out. Experience, skill, enthusiasm, and energy--pee trumps
them all.
It's odd, given
employers' lack of concern about the rest of their employees'
private lives, that they take so much interest in the off-hour
consumption of drugs. The members of the employing class, after all,
don't seem to care whether their potential employees spend their
weekends consuming kiddie porn or abusing their pets. Nor do most
employers show the slightest concern about the adequacy of their
employees' diets and housing arrangements. In fact, they will be
delighted to hire you for $6 or $7 an hour even though, on wages
like that, you will probably be unable to observe the most
elementary proprieties, like living indoors and showering before
showing up for work.
Odder still,
especially for those who think of capitalism as the most "rational"
of economic systems, drug testing doesn't work, even on the
employers' rather Scrooge-like terms. A report released last
September by the ACLU, "Drug Testing: A Bad Investment," summarizes
studies showing that drug testing does not lower absenteeism,
improve workplace safety, or achieve any of the other goals claimed
for it by the anti-drug warriors. This should be no surprise: The
tests mainly detect marijuana, which lingers in the body far longer
than cocaine or heroin, and drug testing labs are often alarmingly
inaccurate, in both the false-negative and false-positive
directions. In addition, smart drug users have all kinds of ways of
foiling the test, from the herb goldenseal (available in health food
stores) to vials of drug-free, battery-warmed urine (available on
the Web). More to the point, most drug users confine their drug
using to their off hours, when it can have little or no possible
effect on their job performance. The residual mental effects of a
weekend joint, for example, are about as powerful as those of a
Saturday night beer--i.e., nil. Not to mention the fact that one of
the most disabling and addicting drugs, alcohol, isn't usually
tested for at all.
And what exactly
would it mean for drug testing to "work," anyway? An argument could
be made for testing airline pilots and school bus drivers, on the
grounds that an off-hour user might, just possibly, be tempted to
take up while landing a 747 or driving on ice-coated streets. But
retail and cleaning service workers? In my town, Winn-Dixie tests
applicants for a $6-an-hour job stacking Cheerio boxes; Howard
Johnson tests applicants for bed-making jobs. Hudson News, which can
be found in New York area airports, greets customers with a sign
boasting that it's a "drug-free workplace," but is the newspaper you
buy there any more interesting if the cashier is an abstainer rather
than a stoner? An alcoholic rather than a coke head?
Speaking of
newspapers, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The
Washington Post all test their editors and writers--a practice that
may actually make these papers less interesting, or at least help
account for their unrelieved blandness. This is not because druggies
make better reporters (though who knows?), but because any
journalist sheep-like enough to submit to a urine test should, on
this evidence alone, be barred from a profession that claims to
value fearlessly independent thinking.
In other areas,
drug testing may actually be counterproductive. First, there's the
cost. The ACLU reports that in 1990 the federal government spent
$11.7 million to test 29,000 employees, only 153 of whom tested
positive--amounting to a cost of $77,000 to detect each putative
drug user! Then there's the likely effect of testing on morale. A
1998 study found that testing "reduced rather than enhanced
productivity" by as much as 29 percent, apparently because it leads
to a certain surliness among the workers.
So why, in contempt
of all the evidence, does American business remain so slavishly
addicted to drug testing? Part of the answer has to be that drug
testing is now a billion dollar industry, meaning that an awful lot
of people have a stake in its health and longevity. Capitalism is
supposed to operate in a briskly rational fashion, but profits can
perpetuate any kind of foolishness. Hence, for example, the
Congressional fondness for obsolete weapons systems: It doesn't
matter if they can't fly or even if the Pentagon has adamantly
rejected them; they keep Lockheed Martin and Boeing content.
Sheer herd
mentality--"peer pressure," as it's known in the anti-drug
movement--also contributes to the drug-testing habit. I once asked a
hotel owner why he tests his employees, and he said, in so many
words: Everyone else is doing it, and I don't want to be the one who
gets stuck with all the druggies and lowlifes who can't get a job
anywhere else in town. This sounded vaguely reasonable until he
added that he couldn't, ha ha, pass one of those tests himself,
which made me wonder: If one pot-head can make all the company's top
decisions, why can't another one be trusted to push a broom?
Nor can we
eliminate the kinkier charms of drug testing--to the employer, that
is. In some testing protocols, the hapless worker has to pull down
her pants in front of a lab technician or attendant and then pee in
the presence of that forbidding audience. This is not a medical
procedure; it's a rite of humiliation, designed to send the employee
the message: We own you, all of you, and our ownership extends way
beyond 5 P.M. Similarly for those intrusive pre-employment
"personality tests," with true-or-false propositions like "I often
feel overwhelmed by self-pity." It's not really our urine that they
want--or our blood or our hair--but our souls.
There are a few
small, hopeful signs. Faced with a severe labor shortage, some
Internet and computer firms are abandoning testing rather than drive
away qualified applicants. In safety-sensitive industries, a few
companies have taken up the far more pertinent practice of
"performance testing"--gauging an employee's motor skills just prior
to work.
But the damage to
democracy has already been done. In a decade of testing, millions of
Americans have grown inured to this invasion of their bodies and
private lives, readily trading their Fourth Amendment protection
from "unreasonable search" in exchange for a job. And submission, no
less than drugs, can be a hard habit to break.
Barbara Ehrenreich
is a columnist for The Progressive.
Return to Passing Drug Test
News Menu
Passing Drug Tests With Ready Clean - XXtra Clean - Root
Clean
|
