Jump to full article: The Washington Post, 2009-05-12
Author: Joe Davidson
Intro: The General Services Administration will no longer allow smoking lounges after June 19 in the 1,500 federal buildings it manages.
But a Federal Communications Commission facility in Columbia is not a GSA property, so its regulations do not apply to the small, nondescript room where FCC workers can go to scar their lungs.
The FCC wants to follow the GSA's lead and make those employees find other air to pollute, but it's not as simple as posting a no-smoking sign. The smoking room was negotiated with the National Treasury Employees Union and shutting it down requires negotiations too.
That puts the NTEU in a tricky situation.
. . .
But what happens when those it represents feel they have rights that are in conflict? Should a union protect the right of unionized smokers when those smokers trample on the right of nonsmokers, also in the bargaining unit, to smoke-free air?
Research leaves no doubt that the nonsmoking side easily wins this debate.
Yet, the union that so forcefully stands up for its members in other ways is a bit weak in the knees when it comes to the smoking room.
"It is important that they [smokers] have a place to go that is away from other employees and safe for them as well," NTEU President Colleen M. Kelley said in December. . . .
Galosky isn't alone in opposing the smoking room.
Evelyn Cherry, who was a local union officer in the 1990s, says only a few people at the FCC facility smoke. "Is it better to cut out the small room or jeopardize the majority?" she asked.
She wants the smoking room closed. "Even though they may have a room that they may call ventilated," she said, "it's still not ventilated to the extent that you can't inhale it but because you can still smell it."
By the way, the National Institutes of Health, where people know something about the ill effects of smoking, does not allow it anywhere, inside or outdoors, on its 311-acre Bethesda campus.
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