Support smoke-free ordinance | Letters | Summerville Journal Scene

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Support smoke-free ordinance

Published Thursday, January 06, 2011 3:51 PM

Summerville Journal Scene ®

Dear Editor,

The SC African American Tobacco Control Network fully supports Dorchester County and Summerville’s efforts to pass comprehensive smoke free ordinances. It affords equal protections for all workers in the workplace. So often, you hear the opposition’s push for businesses to decide whether or not to go smoke free and that if the public does not want to be expose they can go elsewhere to eat or do business. Basically that is correct except when a worker’s health and wellbeing is at risk and they do not have the ability to choose other places to work specifically in light of our weak economy.

What is disconcerting is that any business owner would allow a toxic substance to be in their place of business on a daily basis. Although, among the opposition, there is a tendency to refute the science of danger of secondhand smoke exposure to back their claims, there is irrefutable proof that secondhand smoke is dangerous and any exposure can have a negative impact (Surgeon General’s Report, 2006). For every business that voluntarily goes smoke free, there is another that refuses. Don’t all workers deserve the same protections of a smoke free workplace? Local elected officials are in a position and have a duty to provide this protection if a business owner will not.

There is well-researched material from Americans for Non-smoker’s Rights, a national advocacy group based in Berkeley California on the legal ramifications of secondhand exposure. There is legal precedence in a well-established rule under common law that employers have a duty to provide a safe, healthy workplace and that an employer’s failure to eliminate the hazardous condition caused by tobacco smoke can constitute a breach of the duty to provide a reasonably safe workplace.

Dianne Wilson

Scalybark Road

Summerville

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