Organized Labor and the Problem of “Smokers’ Rights”
This chapter examines the relationship of the labor movement to the decline of smokers' work cultures from the 1970s to the 1990s. As newspaper articles, letters to lobbyists, and published National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) decisions illustrate, the demise of smoking at work often intersected with the efforts of many employers to roll back the power of organized labor. Employers sometimes used no-smoking rules to discipline workers, committeemen, and union organizers for unwanted efforts to shape managerial policy making. Unions often fought for working-class smokers and their vanishing privileges, as the increasing marginalization of smoking and smokers seemed to portend the overall demise of labor's power in the late twentieth century. The NLRB discovered in numerous cases brought by workers and unions that employers tried to sidestep collective bargaining by abruptly creating new no-smoking rules and using smoking restrictions to harass union supporters.