Battling the Enemy Within

• Share

The night shift at the General Motors plant in Wentzville, Mo., was busy putting together Buick Park Avenues and Oldsmobile Regency 98s when ten policemen quietly entered the factory. Making their way along the assembly line, the officers clapped handcuffs on twelve workers. They had allegedly sold cocaine, hashish, marijuana and LSD with an estimated street value of $250,000 to two young undercover agents who had been hired by GM to pose as assembly-line workers.

Alarmed by reports of widespread drug and alcohol use at its Laughlin, Nev., generating station, the Southern California Edison Co. organized its own raid. Corporate managers and security officers cut the personal padlocks off 400 employee lockers to rummage through the contents. They searched cars in the parking lot and even frisked a few workers. Seven employees were fired for possessing drugs or alcohol at work in violation of company rules.

Twenty Unocal employees were startled when company cars and vans converged on their remote oil-pumping station in Piru, Calif., and discharged a cordon of private security officers and drug-sniffing dogs to search the grounds. No drugs were found, but six workers were later suspended when urine tests demanded by the company showed traces of marijuana. The six were reinstated only after they agreed to submit to urinalysis regularly in the future.

In the old days, an oilworker might have decked his boss for asking him to supply a urine sample, and workplace raids by company vigilantes, let alone police, would have been unthinkable. But in the old days, it was rare for someone to come to work stoned on drugs or for managers to have to worry about cokeheads in the office. Not anymore, and not just in isolated instances either. Illegal drugs have become so pervasive in the U.S. workplace that they / are used in almost every industry, the daily companions of blue- and white- collar workers alike. Their presence on the job is sapping the energy, honesty and reliability of the American labor force even as competition from foreign companies is growing ever tougher.

Now U.S. employers have decided to strike back at the drug plague. In high- rise office towers and sprawling factory complexes, in bustling retail stores and remote warehouses, companies are cracking down on workers who get high on the job. Supervisors are watching closely for telltale signs and confronting workers who seem impaired. Employees caught with drugs are often fired on the spot, and suspected users are urged to enter rehabilitation clinics. Hundreds of companies are setting up programs to combat drugs, providing psychiatric counseling for employees, resorting to urinalysis to identify users, and in a few cases going so far as to install hidden video cameras or hire undercover agents.