Refusal to give jobs to smokers ‘is not illegal’

THE European Commission has said companies are legally entitled to refuse employment to smokers.

It comes after an Irish call centre advertised a job and included the line “smokers need not apply”.

The European Commissioner for employment and equal opportunities, Vladimir Spidla, has backed the stance taken by the company, and said discrimination laws did not apply to tobacco users.

“EU anti-discrimination law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of racial or ethnic origin, disability, age, sexual orientation and religion and belief in employment and other fields,” he said.

“A job advertisement saying that ‘smokers need not apply’ would not seem to fall under any of the above mentioned prohibited grounds,” he added in a written response to a Scottish MEP who raised concern about the job advert.

Philip Tobin, director of Dotcom Directories, who wrote the controversial ad, said: “If people are smoking on a coffee break or in their own time they come back into the office and they stink. We have a small office here and it would make things unbearable for the other staff.

“If these people can ignore so many warnings and all that evidence, then they haven’t got the level of intelligence that I am looking for. Smoking is idiotic.”

A UK based pro-smoking group, Forest, said European human rights law guarantees the right to a private life and that it would bring a test case on behalf of anyone sacked for smoking outside office hours.

Director Simon Clark told the Financial Times newspaper: “We know employers discriminate on all sorts of grounds, from being too fat to the wrong colour hair. But for it to be so overt is depressing and shows that smokers are fair game.”

In December last year, the World Health Organisation became the largest international employer to ban the hiring of smokers in an effort to promote its public health campaign against tobacco use.