...worker was fired for failure to urinate on demand (Caterpillar Inc.)

http://www.macon.com/mld/telegraph/news/local/8708514.htm

Posted on Thu, May. 20, 2004
Lawsuit claims worker was fired for failure to urinate on demand

By Mark Niesse
Associated Press

<snip>

A lawsuit filed Wednesday claims a construction equipment company discriminated against an employee who was fired because he wasn't able to urinate for a drug test.

The plaintiff, Tom Smith of Meansville hopes the lawsuit will eventually lead to a nationwide policy change that causes companies to offer alternative drug testing methods, such as hair or blood tests.

Smith says he suffers from paruresis, more commonly known as shy bladder syndrome, and he should be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act. He was dismissed Dec. 5, 2003, by Peoria, Ill.-based Caterpillar Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of construction and mining equipment.

<snip>

If Smith wins his federal lawsuit and Caterpillar appeals, higher courts could set a new standard that would compel companies to move away from reliance on urine drug tests, Soifer said.

<snip>


1 more reason to dislike Caterpillar.

Urine tests are the easiest to fool.

.

:-)

That should have been enough. He should be repaid and rehired.

They should offer several methods of testing. BTW, what is up with the 3 hour limit? Does anyone know the "fall off" rate of drugs in the detection test. I think alcohol goes down rather quickly, by the hour, but I am pretty sure pot takes weeks.

what he does when not in the office. Drug tests are outrageous violations of individual rights. Come the revolution, test administrators will be among the first to go :)

The man worked at Caterpillar. They don't make Tonka trucks, they manufacture heavy machinery. I don't know what his specific job is, but many jobs in manufacturing are dangerous enough on their own without some adle-minded co-worker making thing worse.

Would you say it is nobody's business if your pilot just stepped out of a bar? What about your doctor?

And where is the data to back up your claims that adle-minded co-workers have been a major problem at Caterpillar?

You don't have any do you? Oh well, it still sounds good to justify the invasion of privacy.

The jusification you have given is always employed when a good excuse is needed for subjugating people to the "greater good" regardless of the reality on the ground. It's the same as the "your a Saddam lover" technique.

for not catching them earlier. But, they can only have caught them earlier IF THEY DRUG TESTED!! So explain how Cat was inept.

No, but you have made alot of excuses for blanket invasion of every
single employee's privacy based on claims that someone just might be drug-addled.

And again are you saying that their hiring practices are so bad that they cannot trust the people they hire?

They know that there are drug tests, and they would get fired if they tested positive.

It is a properly negotiated part of the union contract. If you have a beef, ask the union.

Also, take a stroll through the old folks homes around Peoria. See how many men are permanently crippled because of the danger at CAT plants. Then tell me that his co-workers do not have an interest in making sure everyone is not stoned.

There's no excuse for a company's testing for what someone does OFF THE JOB. It's none of their stinking business.

These tests don't determine whether your pilot/doctor just stepped out of a bar.

1) Most pre-employment drug testing does not include alcohol.

2) As you stated, the fall-off rate for drugs varies widely. Something like morphine or cocaine lingers in your system for up to 3 days, whereas mj metabolites can linger, depending on usage, for 3 days to a couple months.

Seems to me that your question then becomes, is it anybody's business if your pilot/doctor smoked a quarter or did an eightball last weekend...


While nobody wants our safety in the hands of a stoned doctor/lawyer/pilot/mechanic, their off-duty practices bring up a definite gray area for some of us.

When they show up for work. They fail, they are sent home for the day. No matter if the reason is drugs, alcohol, or lack of sleep.

If the problem is workers with clouded judegement, then check for that, not the trace remnants of some private activity that happened days before.

Its easy to measure the effect on the job. That's the only thing that should be measured.

The guy with a new baby who can't get a good nights sleep for months, the one with the hangover, the one on strong allergy medicine, the one with allergies and not taking medicine, the one who can't stop worrying about a law suit or family problem, the one who worked thru lunch and has low bloodsugar - they're all more dangerous than the guy who toked up with his buds at the poker game last night or the guy who popped some psychedelics on Saturday.

Slow reflexes, bad concentration, bad coordination, lack of mental agility, attention span problems - None of these problems come just from illegal drugs.

No, they don't. And which drug is most contributory for accidents on the job? Beer, Wine, Hard Liquor. Again, this is not a test to see if they are currently intoxicated, rather, it tests usage in the last month(s). It suffices to punish workers from private behavior, in all likelihood, off the job.

As far as addle minded employees, start in the head office where they are wiping their ass on the 4th Amendment.

The war on drugs has almost nothing to do with industrial safety. It is a system of social control, designed to remove rights and economic opportunity from a selected population.

Would you say that The Company has a vested interest in protecting their "investment" in you, the worker? after all, non-addled employees mean lower insurance costs.

So, let's start checking the employees for "unhealthy lifestyle choices" and fire those who are smokers, non-exercisers, have multiple sex partners, fly hang gliders, etc.

shouldn't be too hard to get something like that up and running, after all, Ford did it back in the 20's with their "psychological Department" , which, among other things, tracked Ford's female employees to make sure they were living in strict rooming houses with no male contact...

I've always maintained that if you have probable cause to believe that I'm impaired, then bring the cup and I'll fill it for you. Otherwise, if you have no reason to believe I'm impaired, take your cup and shove it.

I would NEVER work for some place that "proudly" claims "We test ALL employees and applicants for drug use". Unless we actively resist this bullshit, it will become a "customary" part of getting a job, just like providing an address.

Well, unless two co-workers she's sleeping with get in a fight over whose night it is and start beating each other up with the golf clubs you sell in sporting goods...

About the only thing pre-employment screening does for you is keeps the potheads from applying in the first place. (I once asked Roger the HR guy how many pre-employment positives he'd ever seen. He couldn't remember one, and he's been an HR guy for 25 years.) Probable-cause testing is good.

and pre-employment screening doesn't keep potheads from applying. It just makes us abstain for four weeks before the piss test. Then we piss in the cup, go home, and get high.

Roger didn't say he'd never seen a pothead apply, he just said he'd never nailed one in pre-employment screening.

Look, if you're so disturbed about pot tests that can't determine whether someone's stoned now, invent one that can. (This is the classic "if you don't like Microsoft, write a better OS" argument.) We sent a man to the moon, we should be able to create a piss test that says you're fucked-up right now.

Yeah, I know, "if you don't like pre-hiring piss tests, then don't apply there"

OK, fair enough, I wont. That won't keep me from speaking out against "routine" drug testing.

Like Rev. Neimoller would have said "and when they came for me with their piss-bottle, there was no one left..."

if you work in an environment in which people are likely to get injured, cut, et cetera, HIV transmission becomes an issue. Multiple sex partners is generally an indicator of risk for exposure to HIV.

... yet there I doubt there are more problems with machinery assembled here than with U.S. stuff. People's abilites may become impaired by many other reasons - sleep or emotional problems, depression, legal painkillers, antihistamines or other medication.


Does a recreationally smoked joint on the weekend, which will be detected in a urine test, impair a person more than a hangover?

It is the company's business if he shows up drunk, high on drugs or otherwise incapacitated. What he does on his own time should be none of their business. The drug tests doesn't test whether he was high at the time he takes it, but could test positive if he had smoked a joint 6 weeks ago.

the common man's. Any medical test is private and should not be allowed to be given out to employers or anyone without due cause. A piss test is still medical.

When I read LondonAmerican's comment, I had to respond.

If I was out in the Gulf Stream as captain of a Hatteras 60C fishing boat



running two Cat C30s,



it's got seven or eight fishers aboard who came out for a relaxing day on 12-foot seas hunting for big tunas



and I'm trying to get these folks out of the way of a hurricane that just came on the scope



the last thing I want to think about is "I hope the guy who built my engines didn't have pot brownies for lunch."

(You get the picture.)

The problem is that marijuana is illegal in the first place. I'm reticent about saying all drugs should be legalized, but certainly many "illegal drugs" could be legalized for some uses--pot for recreational use; as long as you're not high now you're okay.

Pot puts us on the horns and heels of a dilemma: because cannabinoids are fat-soluble and leach from your fat deposits (at detectable but not-psychoactive levels) for about ten days, all we can tell you is you had pot sometime within the last ten days.

When you guys elect me president, I will give three major universities each a $2 million grant to develop a pot test that can tell if you're stoned now, not just if you had pot within the last ten days like the current test does, that is affordable enough to buy by the millions, and that can be used by a cop with a day of training so she can conduct roadside sobriety tests with it. If we can tell if you're stoned right now and not sometime in the last week and a half (massive law enforcement implications there, and we'd keep the current test to check people on probation because they're not supposed to smoke at all), we have no reason not to legalize pot.

If you can legally buy pot, a lot of the arguments against it go away. A legal pot user who's not stoned now isn't any more dangerous on the road than a beer user who's not drunk now. A legal pot user who is a cashier is no more likely to steal money from the register to support her pot habit than a legal beer user who is a cashier is to steal to support hers. (That is, unless she works at Wal-Mart, which pays so low she can't afford either beer or marijuana. But that's another issue entirely.)

Two huge parties in the Anti-Weed Campaign are the alcohol and tobacco industries. When we legalize marijuana, we will immediately be able to discern the smart producers from the stupid ones. The stupid ones will be stirring up the freepers, sending thousands of dollars to Republican politicos to support re-abolition, heavily funding the inevitable Readers Digest screeds against The Evil Herb...the smart ones will be purchasing big tracts of land in Central America to grow pot on, creating marijuana brands, and otherwise exploit the situation to their advantage. As Calvin Coolidge said, "of course, the chief business of the American people is business" and the liquor/tobacco companies that follow that dictum will be rich in the Pot Economy. (Not to count the snack food companies..."nothing satisfies the Munchies like a whole skid of Snickers." And you'll need a forklift to put the skids through the window of your ninth-floor apartment. And a new window for when you forget to take the sashes out and break the window while putting the skid through. It's a vicious circle...given enough time, High Times magazine will look like a weird bastard child of Bon Appetit, Taunton's Fine Homebuilding, Cigar Aficionado and Highways and Heavy Construction.

However! There are downsides to all good things, y'know? The poor bastards at the Chicken Wing Festival in Buffalo will be required to have two categories at the speed-eating contest, Stoned and Not Stoned...because you know some big guy will go up there, smoke a couple of blunts the hour before start time, and just demolish the competition.)

I had to fire a guy for drugs just a few weeks ago. About an hour after his lunch, he was bringing a whole bunk of plywood outside for a customer. The roll-up door was closed far enough that the forklift mast could hit it. The spotter saw it was too low and yelled for Fred (not his real name, thank Koresh) to stop so they could open it. Fred kept coming. The spotter rushed over to the door and tried getting it up...Fred almost took the door off the tracks when he hit it. We sent him for a drug test, which he failed. The first thing we asked him in his exit interview was when he smoked last. "I don't smoke because you can smell it, I make pot cookies." All right, then when was the last time you ate pot cookies? "I brought them in my lunch that morning." I would have canned that guy even if weed was legal--driving a forklift around the customers when you're fucked up is just asking for someone to get killed. Smoke that shit after you get off, okay? Jeeze! Some people's children!

I've always wanted to try to make them hold the bottle and then piss on their hand.

This is one of the great blemishes on our society: the need to pee to hold a job. I don't think one should be suspected of drug use because that person wants a full-time job with benefits. Notice how its only when benefits are involved that the company, or more truthfully the insurance company that covers the hiring company, wants these drug tests? I've worked plenty of part-time jobs that if I wanted to apply for a full-time opening with the same company I would have to urinate on demand.

Oh, that and a credit check too. It seems that people with bad credit are going to rip off the company. Never mind the person may be wanting a job to help pay off debt.

If I recall correctly, a few years back an idea was floated around the country (via the media) that candidates for public office should be required to submit to drug tests upon announcing their candidacy. That idea went down the toilet, shrugged off by members of Congress.

So your "only when benefits are involved" theory goes out the window--Wal-Mart's part-timers' only "benefit" is they get paid a little.

I thought the "need to pee" was fueled by insurance companies based on their perception that they will pay out less if the workforce they are insuring is "drug free."

Wal-Mart does pre-employment screening of part-timers.

Now that is REALLY paranoid!

When you hire people who do illegal drugs to work in a company where they can't be supervised closely, they're likely to steal from the company to support their habits.

Or at least that's how the theory goes.

We pre-employment-screen part-timers too, as does Lowe's and Menard's and every independent building materials distributor, but for a different reason: OSHA makes us do it because of all the heavy equipment we use. The heaviest equipment most Wal-Mart associates have access to is a pallet jack, so they don't have that excuse to fall back on.

Companies that have a drug testing policy get to discount the amount of workers compensation insurance that they pay to their state governments. Most companies wouldn't innact a policy unless it affects their bottum line.

har.

and cat has been at war with it's union for years -- and is trying it's very best to bust the union there.
this is one more example of how they terrorize the workers.

stumbled upon the REAL issue here!!....Union busting is an obsession with these pukes, and (pardon the pun!!).."pissing" on union members is one of their favorite passtimes!!

And any excuse will do.

Caterpillar is the epitome of the parental corporation ... and its children are to be seen and not heard. It's like "Stepford, Inc."

I'll never forget the all-expenses-paid interview trip I made there. Fascist Seduction 101. Creepy as hell.

They view it as a safety issue. Now, if a test is fishy then they will fight/arbitrate.

You would too if your life was on the line.

or they are locked and scab labour is hired.
and there is not across the board support for intrusive events like these -- though management would like you to believe that.

Some says pee....give them really stinky pee...

if you test one cow in a zillion we can determine that zero cows have mad cow. Companies are forbidden from testing any additional cows because the science doesn't support more testing......but let's test every single employee repeatedly to make sure they don't smoke a little weed over the weekend........go ahead companies you'all just set your own rules on this one.

Good hard working people's lives are being ruined. Yesterday my wife lost her job of 16 years as an radiology transcriptionist because she tested postive for butabital, her migraine prescription. A new company aquired her old company and implemented pre-employemnt and random drug testing.

She did state that she was taking this med before given the drug test, but the lab's cutoff point for a positive test was below the dosage of her prescription. She spoke to lab and got it straightened out and the lab sent a corrected drug screen back to her employer that was negative. But all this happened after she was fired.

Upon realizing their mistake, they offered to rehire her but to her, the damage has been done. She was treated like a criminal, she's been embarrased, humiliated and slandered and she does not want to go back.

For pain and suffering.

he he

The Great USENET Piss Test!!!

It's old and out of date, but I sure wish they'd do one again. And not just about drug testing!!!

Link: http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Workplace/urine_test.list

*snif* Ah... when the Internet, and all of us, were young and bold.

Seriously, if a woman can not have control over her very own reproductive organs, then can anyone in this nation honestly expect that their bodily fluids will be more protected.

We no longer just 'owe our souls to the company store' friends. We now owe them our penises and vaginas and even our piss.

Soylent Green is People.

or so another DUer claims :eyes:

That is a Pisser

the guy had a drug test, and passed it.

Making employees pee into a jar under supervision is just another way to humiliate the workers.

If they'd done this to Iraqi prisoners, EVERYBODY here would be pissed about it.