Thank you for your opinion. The *ideal* candidate will not be a smoker. At no point are smokers "banned" in the job posting. The *ideal* candidate will not have been convicted of a crime.
As far as I now CA is an "at will" state. Common exceptions in the states which are "at will" are Public Policy (is there a law explicitly forbidding termination for this reason?), Implied Contract (doesn't apply here), and good faith dealing (also no applicable here). If there is no law explicitly prohibiting it, then employment can be terminated by either the employee or the employer for any reason or no reason. I will discuss this with a lawyer and make any needed changes to this policy. On a personal note: As much as I believe in the liberty of someone to smoke, I also believe in my liberty to not be around them and to profit from my business to the degree I want. It's best if we (the smoker and I) agree that enjoyment of our liberties in this case are not compatible to us working together. On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 18:06 -0700, Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Michael J McCafferty wrote: > > > The ideal candidate have excellent professional and personal > > references, never have been convicted of a misdemeanor or felony, is a > > non-smoker. > > I suggest you go take a quick course on California labor law. You're > going to get in a heap of trouble if you keep this up. > > I'm pretty sure you may not discriminate based upon smoking preference. > Now, you can make it sufficiently painful that smokers don't want to > work for you. Obviously, you can choose not to hire someone if you can > tell that they smoke as long as you don't give a reason. > > In addition, you cannot a priori ban people who have even been convicted > of felonies let alone misdemeanors. There is a 4 point checklist you > have to go through in order to exclude someone from employment based > upon convictions. In addition, California has some notoriously > byzantine laws about this. > > Finally, *never* document auxiliary characteristics that you want or > don't want. It will be the first thing pulled out in an employee lawsuit. > > -a > > > > -- ************************************************************ Michael J. McCafferty Principal, Security Engineer M5 Hosting http://www.m5hosting.com You can have your own custom Dedicated Server up and running today ! RedHat Enterprise, CentOS, Fedora, Debian, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and more ************************************************************ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
