This is America. And in America, we enjoy the freedom of being able to do, say, and be what we want.
And some people choose to smoke.
Some of us are also afforded breaks throughout our workday in America. Some people choose to spend that time stepping out for a cigarette. And some of these people choose to work instead of taking breaks throughout the day.
But workers at a Japanese company are complaining about these so-called smoke breaks.
“One of our non-smoking staff put a message in the company suggestion box earlier in the year saying that smoking breaks were causing problems,” Hirotaka Matsushima, a spokesman for Piala Inc., told The Telegraph.
Matsushima estimates that cigarette breaks mean that employees are away from their desks for upwards of 15 minutes each day.
There’s an argument over whether or not it’s fair to non-smokers that smokers get this time.
Personally, everyone should get at least 15 minutes a day to step away from their desks.
We are human and this is 2019 and we should be retreated respectably and like humans, even in our workplaces. What people choose to do in that 15 minutes is their own business.
According to Halo Cigs, some U.S employees who request smoke breaks are allowed to take them but that same time isn’t offered to non-smoking employees.
And that isn’t fair.
It’s not specifically stated whether or not Piala allows its non-smoking employees break time but they came up with a solution to make things fairer for non-smokers and to encourage people to quit smoking.
They are offering non-smokers an extra six days of vacation time each year to make up for the time that smokers take smoke breaks.
“I hope to encourage employees to quit smoking through incentives rather than penalties or coercion,” Piala CEO Takao Asuka said. “I hope to encourage employees to quit smoking through incentives rather than penalties or coercion.”
Smoking has gone down in both Japan and America over the last decade. But Piala’s smoker employees seem to be responding to the new policy.
The company says that about 42 employees have given up smoking since the new incentives started.
Twenty-five-year-old Shun Shinbaba is one of those employees. He used to smoke a full pack of cigarettes every two days. Now he says he is going to use his extra vacation time to play some tennis.
But not everyone said extra vacation days would inspire them to quit. Halo Cigs said that on average, women reported they’d need 11 extra vacation days to inspire them to quit smoking while men said they’d need 12.
What would it take to get you to quit smoking?
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