- Details
- Parent Category: Labor Legalities
- Created on Saturday, 02 August 2008 17:56
- Last Updated on Sunday, 03 February 2013 18:13
Special Smoking Ban: What is True for the Workplace?
The blue haze often resolves disputes and often ends the dispute in court. Because of the dangers of passive smoking is to protect non-smokers, a comprehensive ban on smoking in public places has become law. Where can you still smoke, what applies at work and what at home?
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Also at work non-smokers are to be protected from accidentally passive smoking. Legal requirements can be found in the Workplace Ordinance, Arbeitsstättenverordnung. According to §5 ArbStättV the employer must take appropriate measures to protect against passive smoking and, where appropriate, decree a smoking ban, which is either on the whole premises or even to inpidual areas. The employer, therefore, largely decides how the smoking ban will be executed in his business. He is not required to make elaborate reconstruction measures or install expensive ventilation systems. Conversely, smokers have no claim that a smoking room be set up for them, even with a smoke ban, which covers all of business premises.
What concerns a visitor, the employer has only to take protective measures, as the kind of business and employment permits. Therefore, the employer can still allow his customers to smoke in the premises. This is because the smoking ban applies only to employees and not visitors.
In this context, also a judgment of the State Social Court of Hesse is noteworthy, it strengthens the rights of non-smokers: A fixed-term employer, could not endure the permanent puffing in his office no longer. During a conversation with his boss, he hinted his employee to leave the company before the expiry of his employment contract. This said, this done. He then registered himself as unemployed at the Labor Agency. But the authority imposed on him a cut-off during which the unemployment benefit claim rests. "That's not what's intended", the judges held. It cannot be reasonably expected that the employer could to continue work in office with a smoker. This cut-off period was therefore illegally imposed against him (re: L 6 AL 24/05).
Related articles:
Special on Smoking Ban (Story starts here)
Smoking Ban: Constitutional Court Undoes Ban
Published on the old CMS: 2008/8/2
Read on the old CMS till November 2008: 641 reads
