"It's a sloppy business attitude. Focus on the performance of the employee. Is it lacking or subpar? Fire him, problem solved."
In a perfect world, yes. But you don't exactly know who's going to be productive and who isn't at the point of hiring.
Why is there more drug testing for minimum wage jobs than for office jobs paying several times as much? If anything, higher paying jobs with more responsibilities should be stricter. My guess - that the average weed smoker applying for the office job who is otherwise qualified, is not much less productive or risky as an employee as one who abstains. But for a minimum wage job where the qualifications required are minimal, a drug test can serve as an effective way to keep out thiefs and sucky workers.
If minimum wage employers had perfect information about a prospective employee's productivity, then no, a drug test would not be helpful. But they don't, and there are plenty of minimum wage unqualified workers to choose from. So they do it.
I don't think occasional weed smoking in and of itself hurts an employee's performance. But it's not hard to imagine, that at least among certain strata like the non-college educated, it's associated with being a shittier worker. There's plenty of other sociological data that suggests that the bad shit upper middle class people do, they can shrug off without it hurting their life, while it wrecks those of the lower classes - eg fornication and bastardy.
In a perfect world, yes. But you don't exactly know who's going to be productive and who isn't at the point of hiring.
Why is there more drug testing for minimum wage jobs than for office jobs paying several times as much? If anything, higher paying jobs with more responsibilities should be stricter. My guess - that the average weed smoker applying for the office job who is otherwise qualified, is not much less productive or risky as an employee as one who abstains. But for a minimum wage job where the qualifications required are minimal, a drug test can serve as an effective way to keep out thiefs and sucky workers.
If minimum wage employers had perfect information about a prospective employee's productivity, then no, a drug test would not be helpful. But they don't, and there are plenty of minimum wage unqualified workers to choose from. So they do it.
I don't think occasional weed smoking in and of itself hurts an employee's performance. But it's not hard to imagine, that at least among certain strata like the non-college educated, it's associated with being a shittier worker. There's plenty of other sociological data that suggests that the bad shit upper middle class people do, they can shrug off without it hurting their life, while it wrecks those of the lower classes - eg fornication and bastardy.