If that’s the BBC’s idea of balance, I give up
Friday, January 17, 2020 at 8:42 
The smoking breaks ‘story’ rumbles on.
This morning, eight days after the Swindon Advertiser reported that Don Bryden, MD of KCJ Training and Employment Solutions, had decided to give non-smoking staff an extra four days’ holiday a year to ‘compensate’ them for colleagues taking too many smoking breaks, the subject was featured on BBC Breakfast (above).
In the interim the story had gone national, then international. As I wrote here and here, I have given interviews to Jeremy Vine (Radio 2), Channel 5 News and several local radio stations.
In general however the policy has been reported with few if any opposing comments so I was pleased when a BBC Breakfast producer rang Forest yesterday to ask if we could put forward a spokesman to go head-to-head with MD Don Bryden.
“Yes,” I said, “I’d be happy to do it.” I even offered to travel to Salford, where the programme is broadcast, a six-hour round trip.
Thanks, they said, but no thanks. “We heard you on Jeremy Vine and even the callers were men. It was very male centric. We want a female voice.”
I protested, mildly, but suggested a couple of women, neither of whom proved to be available.
So who did they book to ‘oppose’ the policy? Why, none other than Kuba Shand-Baptiste, a journalist whose column on the subject (I'd quit smoking too if it meant four extra days of holiday – or at least, I'd pretend to) was published on the Independent website yesterday.
To be fair, Kuba was quite a bubbly presence on the programme. She had a sense of humour and I can’t deny that she was rather fun. In contrast, I suspect I would have been quite grumpy and far more inclined to argue with Don Bryden who sat on the sofa enjoying every moment of his 15 minutes of fame.
But that’s the point. This was not a proper debate. In fact, far from defending smokers from the charge that they work fewer hours because of smoking breaks, Kuba’s basic position was not that the policy is unfair to smokers, but that smokers are “sneaky” and “cunning” and will find ways round it.
The actual policy, she said, is a “really positive move. As far as health policies go it’s a really good thing.” Smoking, she added, is a “stupid habit”, a “stupid addiction”.
If that’s the BBC’s idea of balance, I give up.
Reader Comments (3)
Maybe as a smoker, I should have skived work today, with encouragement from the BBC, to appear on the programme.
If I had known they would choose a self hating smoker instead, I would have made an exception and pulled a sickie.
Does it never occur to these people that policies like this, if they become widespread, could well eventually have the effect of making employing smokers much more attractive to employers than employing non-smokers? Four extra days' work per year from every smoking employee, if you took on a few of them, would amount to quite a lot of extra working days that you could get out of them. Non-smokers, on the other hand, would start to represent rather poorer value for money. It's one of the less-well-publicised downsides of the Obamacare system in the US that, because the only people who could be excluded from the scheme were tobacco-users (the other usual reasons for refusal by private insurance companies such as past medical history or drug use or alcohol abuse etc weren't permitted under the scheme), employers pretty soon sussed out that they could save a ton of money by employing smokers rather than non-smokers, and many companies quietly did so, albeit with far less fanfare than those who have adopted a "non-smokers only" policy in recent years. The more that employers use smoking as a means of getting more hours, fewer holidays or offering lower pay out of their smoking employees, the more attractive, value-wise, smokers become in comparison to their non-smoking colleagues.
Just a thought ...
Unless the employer is an out and out smokerphobic bigot like this awful woman https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/news/5180353/elgin-hotel-boss-smoking-discrimination-employees/amp/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sharebarweb&__twitter_impression=true
Simon, I have no idea how it could be funded but I do think the time has come for smokers to take legal action against these blatent discriminatory employers who would not be allowed to get away with this behaviour towards any other minority.