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Should a smoker-teacher be able to skim 69 minutes off of his morning classes just because he smokes ?

Permit me: teachers are too busy in class to be able to take smoke breaks. Common sense dictates this.

Not at all. I'm also a big suporter of at-will employment rights. Nobody is entitled to an employment position against the will of the employer. (My Contracts professor says that Indiana is probably the best state in the union for supporting at-will rights, so I'm probably not as adamant a defender of it as I should be. We've got it covered, here!)

If the employer wants to fire the employee for being away from their desk for 69 minutes per day, that's appropriate, too. The problem is that they're mandating him to be away from his desk to smoke. To be fair, they should find some way to ensure that the worker can still be productive while they are reoved from the working area... outside phone calling, smoker-only workrooms, and mundane manual labor duties immediately come to mind. (No help for the nico-fiend teachers, though!)

As stated above, it was making smoking verboten in the workplace that has caused these problems. Repeal that rule, and most of the issues go away. Unfortunately we have a populace and a bureaucracy that both demand that laws and regulations settle all disputes, rather than intelligence, social skills, and diplomacy.