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Lockheed Martin to Go Smoke free
Growing trend among companies to go smoke free
Parts excerpted from the Star-Telegram, 8/25/06
Lockheed Martin, based in Fort Worth (TX),
unveiled plans Thursday to eliminate cigarettes
and all tobacco products from its
campus-style properties starting Jan. 1. The new rules will prohibit
smoking both inside Lockheed's buildings and outside -- going beyond
the current policy that allows smoking in designated outside areas.
It's part of an effort to rein in rising healthcare expenses, which
now cost the company about $800 million annually.
Although employees
remain free to light up on their own time outside of work, the
company is hoping that the new restrictions will push many smokers
to drop the habit altogether. And it's offering workers and their
families free access to programs aimed at helping them quit.
Lockheed's
intent "is not to punish anyone," spokesman Tom Greer said
Wednesday. "It's to promote the health of all employees and contain
the medical costs that we share."
Lockheed's action follows moves by several other North Texas
employers who are targeting tobacco as a key culprit behind their
spiraling healthcare costs. Bell Helicopter, for example,
prohibits smoking as part of a broader health-promotion program. "We
did what they're going to do over a year ago," Bell spokesman Mike
Cox said. "There was some grumbling and some reorientation on the
part of some folks. But our whole campus is smokefree now."
The parent company of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Texas also plans
to eliminate cigarettes in November from its Richardson
headquarters, as well as offices throughout Texas and three other
states.
"It includes inside, outside, the garage, the parking lot,
everything," Blue Cross spokeswoman Margaret Jarvis said. "It
includes visitors, contractors, employees, everybody that comes on
our campus."
The company
also plans in 2008 to begin collecting higher insurance premiums
from employees who smoke.
That's an increasingly common strategy, with some U.S. employers now
charging smokers as much as $1,000 extra a year, said Camille
Haltom, a healthcare consultant at Hewitt Associates.
Tobacco is linked
to so many diseases that many companies have forbidden smoking for
years in their buildings and the immediate surroundings, such as
doorways. Overall, Americans spend $150 billion a year
dealing with tobacco-related illnesses, said Dr. Paul Handel, Blue
Cross' chief medical officer.
"If we were not
spending $150 billion on the effects of smoking, what would that do
in terms of helping to provide healthcare coverage for some of the
uninsured?" Handel said. "What would that do to help find a cure for
juvenile diabetes or lymphoma? Instead, what we are doing as a
nation is we're continuing to spend the dollars chasing the effects
of diseases that basically people are bringing on themselves. And
we're all paying for it."
At Lockheed,
employees who get caught sneaking a smoke in the parking lot will be
considered violators of company policy, Greer said. "We follow a
process that involves reminders, warnings for violations, and a
series of progressive disciplinary steps for repeated violations,"
he said.
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