Probable Cause Drug Testing

madison31401

Just need a reality check. Have had three different employees (one a manager) come to HR to tell the HR representative at one of our offsite facilities that there are people in a certain area of the office that are using and dealing drugs on company time. We are a Defense Contractor and have a strict drug policy in place and every employee signed a copy of this policy when we disseminated it or if newly hired. There are over 20 employees involved and I've checked and all signed the drug policy statement (agreeing to abide by the terms and agreeing to drug testing for probable cause).

We are going to bring a drug testing company (SAMHSA certified)in to do the drug tests on site
next week. These will be unobserved tests unless we have reason to believe that the sample has been tampered with.

Employeeds will be informed that if the test is positive they will be terminated and if they refuse to take the test they will be terminated (note that this is our policy for any positive drug test.)

Does anyone see any minefields here?

Thanks.

JM in ATL

As long as your policy clearly states your intentions and all employees being tested have signed the policy, you should be OK, if this is something you normally do.

If you are doing it b/c of rumors then I hope you also have a statement that you do non-discriminate random testing b/c rumors aren't probable cause.

Don D

Sounds like a plan to me. I've done this several times myself. Go for it. Blue water and all. Don't forget to post guards at the gate. Fire anybody who tries to exit and slip through the gate. No excuses.





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Leslie

[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON 03-22-04 AT 09:05AM (CST)[/font][br][br]Does your policy allow for random testing of a group or dept? Here's our verbiage:

Random Testing - Ongoing testing of all employees may be done on a random basis. Random testing may be by employee, by site, by department, or by job classification.

Or do you have a definition of a general test of all employees?

Singling out this group is dangerous without one or the other of these in your policy.