Is smoking the new frontier for EEO actions? Hospitals and other health institutions (the National Institutes for Health in the Washington metro area comes to mind) proclaim that they are smoke-free. Some employers are going a step further and have become smoker-free. The reason is that these employers, regardless of their business, have a stake in keeping health benefit costs down. Having healthy workers would help achieve that goal, and smoking is unhealthy.

Under federal law smokers are not a protected class. But does smoking implicate protected classes? Smoking itself is an activity, not a disability. Nicotine addiction might be an impairment, but it may or may not be a disability under federal law. Another angle is whether smokers tend to be more prevalent in some race/ethnic groups. The Centers for Disease Control issued a report last year indicating that smoking rates varied by industry, but did not go into demographics. (more…)