Nonsmokers want time off to make up for co-workers’ cigarette breaks

Those smoke breaks add up over a year.

And nonsmokers want their time off too — in the interests of fairness.

A survey of Americans’ attitudes toward smoking breaks indicates that the overwhelming majority of smokers think letting employees take time out is fair (81.2 percent) while a similarly strong percentage of nonsmokers think it is not fair (74.8 percent).

In fact, nonsmokers think it’s so unfair that many more of them think they should get extra vacation days to offset they time they don’t waste lighting up.

More than 80 percent of nonsmokers said companies should give people who don’t smoke at least some time off, with 24.6 percent suggesting one or two days, 41.9 percent backing three to five days, and 13.6 percent thinking they deserved six or more days.

In contrast, the largest group of smokers who took the survey (38.2 percent) thought their tobacco-free brethren should not get extra holidays at all. Smaller shares of smokers thought nonsmokers should get one or two days (17.4 percent), three to five days (28.0 percent), and six days or more (and 16.4 percent)

But the poll also suggests that even the most generous of those four choices still wouldn’t level out the time off.

The survey of 1,005 Americans, which was commissioned by the e-cigarette manufacturer Halo and performed using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, also asked smokers how much time they used on cigarette breaks per day, then multiplied that out to a year.

In the breakdown of 14 industries, only in two (legal and real estate) did smokers not report taking at least 10 days of work time per year to light up outside. And only in one other industry (manufacturing) was the number less than 14 days.

There is precedent for giving nonsmokers “smoke-break” vacation days.

Japanese marketing firm Piala Inc. granted non-smoking staff six extra days off last year after an employee complained that smoke breaks were affecting productivity.

Piala also wanted to discourage smoking in a country where it is much commoner and part of the workplace culture then in the U.S.

“I hope to encourage employees to quit smoking through incentives rather than penalties or coercion,” CEO Takao Asuka told Kyodo News.