Tougher Smoking Policy Puts Union in Tight Spot

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.

It fights vigorously for its members in 31 agencies across the government, from the Agriculture Department to the Social Security Administration. For 70 years, according to its Web site, the organization has worked with government bosses, Congress and in the courts “to protect, promote and expand the rights of those it represents.”

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.

But smoking isn’t safe for anyone, anywhere — even nonsmokers. And late yesterday, Kelley issued a statement saying NTEU would not oppose closing smoking lounges in FCC buildings. However, she added: “These decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.” Yet, no case can be made for smoking rooms, even though Kelley’s concern for those with a deadly addiction is understandable.

The dry language of a surgeon general’s document makes it clear:

“Secondhand smoke exposure causes disease and premature death in children and adults who do not smoke. . . . Secondhand smoke contains hundreds of chemicals known to be toxic or carcinogenic (cancer-causing), including formaldehyde, benzene, vinyl chloride, arsenic, ammonia, and hydrogen cyanide.”

Smoking rooms were allowed under a 1997 executive order that otherwise established a smoke-free workplace in executive branch agencies. But science has progressed since then and now we know that smoking rooms don’t keep toxins from people who never enter the hazy dens.

“The American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE), the preeminent U.S. body on ventilation issues, has concluded that ventilation technology cannot be relied on to control health risks from secondhand smoke exposure,” the surgeon general’s office said in a fact sheet revised last year.

And the American Lung Association says it supports measures to require totally smoke-free environments.

Seventeen members of Congress, led by Rep. Susan A. Davis (D-Calif.), wrote to President Obama in March, asking him to close loopholes in former president Bill Clinton’s order. They want Obama to issue a new one “to completely protect federal employees from second-hand smoke.”

“Only about 30 percent of the total federal workforce will be protected by the GSA ban, according to the Congressional Research Service,” the letter says.

David Galosky, a 54-year-old FCC electrical engineer, whose father died a painful smoking-related death, has been waging a two-year fight to close the room at the FCC workplace. He thinks union leaders should have been on the front lines in the fight against the room and for smoking cessation programs.

“They should have been protecting those who are being exposed to secondhand smoke by removing smoking lounges inside federal buildings,” Galosky said.

The union and the FCC have not organized a stop-smoking program at the Columbia facility, but Kelley said last month that it has negotiated such efforts “at a number of federal agencies, including in our largest contract with the Internal Revenue Service. We will continue to explore ways to help employees who wish to be smoke-free. In the meantime, the NTEU is also concerned that those employees who do still smoke have a safe place, away from other employees, in which to do so.”

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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