Found this at
http://www.jrf.org.uk/knowledge/findings/foundations/694.asp
I expect the companies that are most likley to do drugs testing will be US owned. But is unclear whether they do this to all their employees.
I did have a friend who got a job but subsequently failed the drugs test and was told to get on his bike. That wacky baccy stays in the system for weeks, apparently.
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The law
The legal position on drug testing at work is confused. There is no direct legislation and important legal questions hinge on interpretation of a range of provisions in health and safety, employment, human rights and data protection law. The main principles behind the current legal and self-regulatory provisions appear to be as follows:
* that people are entitled to a private life;
* that employers are required to look to the safety of the public;
* that people are entitled to dignity;
* that people are entitled to proper quality standards for evidence used against them in court or disciplinary proceedings.
These are emerging issues for jurisprudence and there has, to date, been little case law on drug testing arising from the Human Rights Act 1998 and the Data Protection Act 1998. Some of the issues have been clarified to some degree with the publication by the Information Commissioner of the consultation draft of Part 4 of the Employment Practices Data Protection Code in November 2003 (Information Commissioner, 2003). The Information Commissioner is responsible for the implementation of the Data Protection Act. According to the Commissioner's draft Code, the legitimacy of drug testing will depend on showing that there are health and safety concerns and on providing evidence of real (not assumed) impairment of performance.
Trends and trajectories
A MORI poll was conducted on behalf of the IIDTW in 2003. Over 200 companies were surveyed, of which 4 per cent conducted drug tests and a further 9 per cent said that they were likely to introduce tests in the next year. In addition, 78 per cent said that they would be more likely to test if they believed that drug or alcohol use was affecting performance or productivity. Overall numbers might seem comparatively low on the MORI findings, but this is highly misleading. If 4 per cent of businesses are drug testing this will affect hundreds of thousands of employees. If the 9 per cent of businesses who told MORI that they were likely to introduce testing in the next year do so, then this trebles the proportion of UK businesses testing over a 12-month period.
The IIDTW was not able to establish the extent of drug testing at work or the overall trends to its own satisfaction, with other surveys producing different figures to the MORI poll, largely reflecting the differences in their respective samples.
A major expansion of drug testing at work, while far from inevitable, is now a genuine possibility. The North American experience shows how rapidly drug testing at work can expand, with testing in the US developing into a multi-billion dollar industry since the 1980s. There is evidence that increasing numbers of British employers are identifying drug and alcohol use as a problem for them. There is a lack of evidence to suggest that drug and alcohol use is in fact having a serious and widespread effect on the workplace in modern Britain. There is a need for continued monitoring of trends and trajectories.
you got there in the end lnf!
