Sacked secretary leads anti-smoking battle

Press, 29 May 1984, Page 17

Sacked secretary leads anti-smoking battle

From

WILLIAM SCOBIE

in San Francisco

When Claudia Marshall asked her chain-smoking boss not to puff in the office, the answer was short. “I was fired,” said Claudia, “within 90 minutes, and without severance pa y” o „ But in San Francisco an employer cannot do that any more. A non-smoker, Claudia Marshall, aged 27, has sued her former employers for $lOO,OOO in punitive damages, charging wrongful dismissal and violation of the city’s controversial new law limiting smoking in the workplace. “The office wasn’t big. The smoke gave me awful headaches,” said Claudia. “Everyone was complaining.” So she typed a note reminding Sharon Robertson, owner of the California design firm, of the new ordinance. Ms

Robertson, through her lawyers, refuses to comment. Since last March, businesses throughout San Francisco — banks, law firms, television stations, newspaper offices, insurance companies — have been irritably looking for ways to comply with the toughest, most divisive anti-smok-ing measure yet adopted by an American city. Claudia Marshall’s suit will be the first test of the new law in the courts, but certainly not the first office shindig it has inspired. Narrowly passed by a referendum and

anxiously opposed by the powerful tobacco industry, the measure gives non-smokers veto powers over whether and where there can be smoking on the job. Firms and factories must now set aside smoking and non-smoking areas, or make other arrangements to keep both factions happy. Even if only one abstainer files a complaint, city health experts will descend. Employers will be obliged to tighten rules and put up “no smoking” signs — or face up to $5OO a day in fines. “The way it’s written, one person

can set office policy, whatever the owner wants,” says Blanche Streeter, head of “San Franciscans Against Government Intrusion,” a coalition that fought the measure at the last election. “Anyone with a petty office spite can use it to get even.” The tobacco industry spent more than $1 million in a bid to beat the ban, and lost. The industry fears “the rot” will spread. Already, some 35 American states and

scores of towns have moves to restrict smoking in restaurants, stores, offices, and other public places. Cigarette companies will spend additional millions this year to oppose measures coming before lawmakers in New York, Washington D.C., and other cities. Is it working in San Francisco? “We’ve had no fist-fights,” says one manager of a 40-person downtown office, “but there’s tension, arguments between friends.

Smokers resent being put out in the lobby to smoke, like kids. Nonsmokers get uppity. Two guys at a cafe table will tell a third to leave because he’s lighting up.” Spokesmen for the city’s two biggest employers, Bank of America (11,000 workers) and Bechtel (10,000), the engineering giant, insist that all is working out smoothly. Both firms have made costly office changes. Smaller companies, according to surveys by the American Cancer Society and other health groups, are doing less.

“It ranges from opening the windows to air-purifying systems and smoking breaks for users,” says a San Francisco health official. “Maybe the best thing of all is that a lot of people who want to kick the habit are really being encouraged to do it,” “Quit-smoking” clinics using aversion therapy report booming business. Some companies are helping addicts financially. One advertising agency paid the bills for six workers who agreed to visit an acupuncturist specialising in break-

ing tobacco and drug addiction. They would reimburse the firm if, after an apparent cure, they later returned to smoking. Either the acupuncturist or bis bills were persuasive: none of the six have gone back to the weed. Use of tobacco has fallen slowly but steadily in America since the United States Surgeon-General in 1964 proclaimed smoking to be a major cause of lung cancer. The industry has never conceded any risk and today rejects more recent research indicating that “secondhand smoke” is also hazardous. Cigarette companies are now funding a massive advertising campaign to persuade Americans that such reports are false. — Copyright, London Observer Service.