Employment Law Commentary, April 2011

By now most people in the United States are accustomed to working in mandatory smoke-free environments. No smoking in the workplace has become such a cultural norm that seeing otherwise can be weirdly startling. Take the hit TV show MadMen, for example. Its office scenes of chain-smoking ad men and prettily puffing secretaries have inspired scores of articles,blog posts, and commentary. To imagine a time when the hallways of work were clouded with cigarette smoke seems, to entire generations in the job force, well, unimaginable. Theirony is that most of the actors on Mad Men are smoking herbal cigarettes on set instead of tobacco¹ —and that's, of course, because they work in modern-day California, which, like most states, prohibits any smoking of tobacco products in theworkplace.²