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119 Monthly Lab. Rev. 35 (1996)
Prevalence of Drug Testing in the Workplace

handle is hein.journals/month119 and id is 1047 raw text is: Prevalence of drug testing in the workplace Drug testing continues to develop as a popular strategy to control substance abuse in the workplace; the incidence of testing is partially based on the type of worksite, characteristics of employees, and policies of the company ubstance abuse has compelled many U.S. firms to create strategies that would help keep it out of the workplace. Some firms have sponsored elaborate and extensive pro- grams to control alcohol and drug misuse.' However, these programs have tended to rely on a supervisor's, a coworker's, or an employee's judgment about the presence of substance abuse in another individual or themselves. In the 1980s, some firms began to adopt drug and alcohol test- ing as an objective strategy to detect and control substance abuse. Advocates of this approach as- sert that an employee's positive test results can be linked to impairments in job performance, safety risks, and absenteeism.2 While drug testing programs span many segments of society (including suspected criminal offenders and automobile operators), this article focuses on the prevalence and characteristics of drug testing programs in private-sector workplaces within the United States. First, we describe the proliferation of drug tests as evidenced in earlier studies. We then present our findings from a national telephone survey conducted in 1993, which estimated the prevalence and characteristics of testing programs, and descriptors of worksites most likely to implement them. We discuss the implementation of various types of programs (that is, preemployment, random, regular), the types of worksites that conduct such tests, and the employees who are eligible to be tested in those worksites. Research findings are discussed within the context of social policy and the findings of earlier research studies. Lastly, we offer some comments regarding the future of testing and its integration with other workplace substance abuse control strategies. Drug testing trends Surveys of worksite respondents indicate a grow- ing trend in the implementation of drug testing programs from the mid-1980s to the present. For example, one study finds that 18 percent of For- tune 500 companies tested their employees in 1985, but by 1991, the proportion had more than doubled to 40 percent.' A survey conducted by the American Management Association in 1988 indicated increases in the testing of both appli- cants and current employees for drugs. Thirty- eight percent of all the organizations in the sur- vey tested job applicants, compared with 28 per- cent of those in 1987; 36 percent tested current employees, compared with 28 percent in 1986.1 By 1991, 48 percent of Fortune 1000 firms en- gaged in some type of drug testing.5 Another study found that up to 63 percent of surveyed employers performed some type of testing in 1992.6 And, in a survey of 342 large firms (that is, firms that have more than 200 workers) in the State of Georgia, Terry Blum, and others report that 77 percent of the companies engaged in some type of drug testing between 1991 and 1992.1 In addition to these relatively small surveys, repre- sentative national surveys conducted by the Bu- reau of Labor Statistics indicate that 31.9 percent of worksites with more than 250 employees had drug testing programs in 1988, and by 1990, that proportion had increased to 45.9 percent .8 Even Monthly Labor Review November 1996 35 Tyler D. Hartwell, Paul D. Steele, Michael T. French, Nathaniel F Rodman Authors' affiliations are on page 41.

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