“You don’t know if smokers have a harder time finding work or if smokers are more likely to lose their jobs – or that when nonsmokers lose their jobs, they become stressed and start to smoke”, Judith Prochaska, associate professor of Medicine at Stanford and lead author of the study, said in a press release.
Advertisement
Prochaska herself did a cross-sectional study that found unemployed job seekers in California were significantly more likely to be smokers than employed Californians.
After one year 27 per cent of smokers had jobs, compared with 56 per cent of non-smokers, but smokers also earned on average £3.50 ($5) less, per hour. That number did take into account their age, education and overall health.
Note that this observational study found that unemployed smokers were less likely than unemployed nonsmokers to find work.
Researchers have long understood that smoking rates among the unemployed are particularly high, but do people smoke because they’re unemployed, or are they unemployed because they smoke?
In an editorial published with the study, JAMA Internal Medicine deputy editor Mitchell Katz, MD, of the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, also cited the study location as a potential limitation, but he added the researchers’ estimate, after rigorous adjustment, of a 24% increase in employment associated with smoking cessation has important implications. “We found that smokers had a much harder time finding work than nonsmokers”, said Prochaska. Working with two local employment development departments in the San Francisco Bay Area, their team tracked 131 smokers and 120 nonsmokers seeking employment over the course of a year.
Prochaska said the smokers may hurt their own chances. For example, smokers were, on average, younger, less-educated and in poorer health than nonsmokers. Further, they trimmed the data to remove extreme cases such as smokers who were so different on these variables from nonsmokers that there was no overlap in the distributions. Employers say job seekers are at a disadvantage if they smell of smoke.
“We designed this study’s analyses so that the smokers and nonsmokers were as similar as possible in terms of the information we had on their employment records and prospects for employment at baseline”, said co-author Michael Baiocchi, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford.
A year after enrollment, 55.6% of nonsmokers were reemployed, compared with 26.6% of the smokers (adjusted risk difference, 0.20; 95% CI 0.15-0.42). When the smokers were asked about their spending priorities tobacco was placed above outgoings including transport funds, mobile phone and grooming care – such as getting a haircut.
The authors are now recruiting subjects for a follow-up study to test whether or not an intervention aimed at helping job seekers quit smoking will help them have an easier time getting hired.
‘The health harms of smoking have been established for decades, ‘ Dr Prochaska said.
Prochaska’s team surveyed 251 people looking for work, about half daily smokers and half nonsmokers.
Advertisement
For details about quitting smoking, try the American Cancer Society.
