How far would you let a boss push you? Perhaps your
boss keeps refusing to raise your pay and also cuts your health-care
coverage. Still, good jobs are hard to find, so you stick it out. But what
if the boss then has surveillance cameras installed to keep an eye on you
and also requires on-the-job drug testing? This invasion of privacy angers
you, but you need the job, so you shrug it off.
But next the boss wants you to follow you out of the
workplace and control what you do on your own time. If you do things after
hours that do not conform to your boss’s own particular beliefs,
you’re fired. Would you put up with that?
Believe it or not, more and more bosses are insisting
that they have the right to monitor and regulate the activities of
employees off the job, even perfectly legal activities. Howard Weyers is
one such boss. He’s honcho of Weyco, an insurance-management
corporation in Michigan. Weyers doesn’t like smokers, so he has
instituted an anti-smoking policy.
Fine . . . except that Weyers’ policy outlaws
smoking off the job as well as on. He has imposed random mandatory
breath-analysis tests on his 200 employees. If they fail once,
they’re fired. For Weyers, a former football coach, it’s a
matter of making people better — more virtuous, even. He says he used
to hone his players “mentally and physically” — and, he
says, “That’s what we need to do in the workplace.”
Excuse me, but who made Weyers our nanny? If he can be
the no-smoking dictator, other bosses can dictate that employees
can’t have a beer after work, must go to a particular kind of church
on Sunday, or can’t have partisan bumper stickers on their cars.
This article appears in Mar 3-9, 2005.
