Here's a non-drug related one. In many places road construction companies will disallow workers from wearing headphones. This is because of the heavy machinery and you need to hear the beeps of a machine backing up. Drivers of those do not have good sight around the machinery and large trailers. Headphones on can mean not hearing a warning sound and being struck and possibly killed.
Are wearing headphones a problem? Do you want to fire someone until an accident happens?
Part of the proactive nature to this is insurance companies. If there aren't strict safety policies that are enforced than insurance companies won't cover companies. When accidents occur they have to pay out and want to avoid that.
Drug use has been proven to cause certain issues depending on the drug that can have safety impacts at work sights. This can costs lives and money.
This is why it becomes a big deal in certain fields.
I had to mummify a guy's hand because it was sliced open by glass, once. They were airlifted to the hospital because the bleeding couldn't be controlled.
Another guy was doing something unsafe with his forklift, probably because he was in a hurry, right before Christmas, it rolled over on him and he died.
That's why we couldn't keep people who were careless for any reason around. People could, and did, die for a moment of carelessness.
You're asking for more of this kind of story.
Make workers do a 30 second ability test before going on shift. Design the test to measure reaction speed, short term memory, etc.
[follow up thought] - Test must be immune to practice/muscle memory. Don't want a drunk passing the test through familiarity, then performing shit on the job.
A) when getting hired B) if you show up to work intoxicated C) after any serious accident
So other than at hiring, which the person can anticipate the timing of, the drug tests are effectively only done after failing such a test to begin with. The average factory doesn't care about hiring people with a record, either, so long as it's not too serious or likely to impact work.
Your test is one of those things that sounds like a good idea until you realize that the people who are needed for some big customer's order are too tired, but still able to work and you don't have anyone to replace them. Rolling the dice on that kind of stuff enough times until a failure happens is what gets factory floors in trouble.
That poor guy just wanted to get home to see his family for Christmas and busted ass to get one more dumpster of trash dumped even if it meant messing with the dumpster while the forklift was on too much of an incline. I don't truly know what he was thinking, but we can make an educated guess that he'd probably done that kind of thing before and doing things the right way took more time and effort than his poor, tired body had left in him at that point.
You don't appear to be aware of all the bad incentives that aren't going anywhere and are advocating something that will cause more people in more factories to roll more dice that will have more injuries. and hoping that the same tired, overworked, short-handed people will make a fuss over these rules instead of rolling the dice as they have so many times before if you just try to warn them or give them tests which they could skip to save 5 minutes they could've been working and then go home that much earlier.
Most of the ways to fix these problems require more staff and/or resources, shorter and more stable shifts, etc. all of which costs more money. Then those labor costs make them less competitive with factories in places like China where they may be trying to compete with literal slave labor in a race to the bottom. The factories already do look at incidents, as well as close calls, but there's only so much you can do when your grand ideas are paired with awful execution thereof.
The best ideas come when you understand their job and help them do things in a better, safer and, ideally, easier way.
I think the better solution is to abstract out the judgement into a formula that the pilot must follow, so not courting "gethereitis"
At least pilots mostly actually do their paperwork and checklists, even if they sometimes fall prey to things like neglecting to land their helicopter when they end up in IFR conditions while, say, transporting Kobe to a game.
A pre-shift only needs to fail once and you have a co-workers recklessness injuring another worker.
I wonder what unions think of drug tests? As a union member I might prefer that my coworkers were tested to be honest if I worked closely with them around heavy machinery.
Many software developers working for companies have agreements that they can't compete with their current employer on what they do while employed there. It's something employees give up while employed somewhere.
In the name of safety, many jobs with safety issues have to give up certain things (i.e. drugs) while employed there.
This same logic would also apply to lack of sleep, and is often glorified as part of the culture (doctors).
First, I'm attempting to describe how the system works rather than give my opinion on how it should be.
Second, the headphones situation is meant to illustrate how safety plays in. This isn't a "what if" example. People on job sites wearing headphones have died because they missed the warning tones. I am aware of one case, personally.
Safety is a big deal. It plays into the insurance companies who drive much of the policies and practices. They are driving the things they do to keep their costs down. Insurance companies often try to be pretty methodical in what they do to keep costs down. It's not just random ideas but looking at cause/effect relationships.
Third, many drugs have effects outside of the time they are used. It's not just the impact of the drug while one is on it but how it affects them in the time they are not on it, as well. From a safety perspective that cannot be discounted.
From the standpoint of the companies and the people involved, if you want to do drugs than work elsewhere. Safety is a higher priority.
I proposed my catch-all solution for this in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26183297
My ideal is we just ensure competence - guy who smoked weed last night may be more competent than a clean guy getting divorced. Test the competence
It would be great if there was a way to test for competence. Some drugs cause long term issues with decision making and being able to see what's likely to happen. This reminds me of a job I had years ago framing houses. I remember some of the work men firing nails from a nail gun into a nearby woods. An area where neighborhood kids happen to play.
That's poor decision making and a liability. How do you test for complex things like that?
Film the worksite or send surprise inspectors to catch workers too lazy/reckless about their nail gunning. Maybe show them videos of nail gun injuries!
Improper nailgunning I think is more related to ingrained attitude than ephemeral competence degraders (drugs)
Did you know eating a poppyseed bagel will cause a positive for heroin for upto 60 hours afterwards while doing a small amount of heroin will not show up on that same test.
Airline pilots, I believe, have a no-drink-within-X-hours rule. I'm not sure whether X is 12, 24, or more. So even one drink the night before a morning flight would be prohibited, even though logically a single drink with dinner the night before should be a non-issue.
Edit for more context:
Depending on the drug, substances consumed outside of working hours would still show up in a drug test. Firing someone for something they do outside of work shouldn't be acceptable.
If you can prove they consumed drugs that would impair their ability to perform their job during working hours, that'd be a valid cause for dismissal. Drug tests don't measure that precisely enough though.
Not to mention, drug tests are not infallible. They can come back positive for morphine if you eat a poppy seed bagel in the morning [1].
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/poppy-seeds-alter-drug-tes...