It’s estimated that Copenhagen Council, the largest single employer in Denmark, could save DKK87m annually if it banned smokers from lighting up during working hours.
According to a new report, the average smoker spends around 50 minutes, or 11 per cent of the workday, on smoke breaks ‘...and by allowing them extra breaks throughout the day the council is supporting an addiction and maintaining a culture of smoking at work’. Even though council administrators have pinpointed smoking as the biggest single risk to public health, and smoking legislation has been tightened significantly over the past few years, a political majority at Copenhagen Town Hall is still reluctant to slap a total ban on smokers.
Social Democrat spokesman Ikram Sarwar said prohibition hysteria has reached its limit and politicians can’t just impose a complete ban on smoking in the workplace.
“I’m sure that council workers carry out their jobs efficiently even if they smoke a cigarette every now and again,” he said. The Socialist People’s Party spokesperson, Sisse Marie Berendt Welling, a member of the Town Hall’s finace committee, said it wasn’t up to politicians to poke their noses into what employees do during their coffee or lunch breaks. “That would be just to authoritarian,” she said. “It still isn’t illegal to smoke.”