Skip to main content

Medical Marijuana & the Workplace


Medical marijuana is one of the emerging labor & employment topics that is starting to show up in workplaces across the country (along with transgender matters).  In the Northeast, both Pennsylvania and Ohio are at the forefront of the issue as both states have either legalized medical marijuana (Pennsylvania) or appear close to doing so (Ohio).  The question then inevitably turns to how this impacts employers and employees in each state.

In Pennsylvania, the state is set to legalize medical marijuana after the state legislature passed Senate Bill No. 3 and Governor Tom Wolf is expected to sign it into law.  Under the law, as it relates to medical marijuana in the workplace, employers in the state will be prohibited from discharging, threatening, refusing to hire or otherwise discriminating or retaliating against an employee on the basis of that employee's status as a person certified to use medical marijuana.  Before employers start to get worried, the law does not require employers to make any accommodations for employees to use medical marijuana on work property or any place of employment.  As well, employers will not be prohibited from disciplining an employee for being under the influence of medical marijuana in the workplace. 

As for Ohio, there are currently two ballot initiatives on the matter along with House Bill 523 as it relates to legalizing medical marijuana.  Under house Bill 523, Ohio employers would not be required to accommodate an employee's use of medical marijuana nor would an employer be prohibited from refusing to hire an applicant because of their medical marijuana use.  Interesting to note that under this Bill, "A person who is discharged from employment because of that person's use of medical marijuana shall be considered to have been discharged for just cause."

It will be interesting to see how these medical marijuana issues play out in the workplace going forward.  Something tells me this is not the last we have heard of medical marijuana in the workplace...



For those interested, additional information on Ohio's proposed law can be found here: search-prod.lis.state.oh.us/solarapi/v1/general_assembly_131/bills/hb523/IN/00?format=pdf
 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

NLRB: Discussion Among Employees About Tip Pooling is Protected Concerted Activity

  This Advice Memorandum from the National Labor Relations Board’s Associate General Counsel, Jayme Sophir, addressed whether employees which discussed and complained about tip pooling at work constituted protected concerted activity. In relevant part, an employer in New York operated a chain of steakhouses.  While tip pooling was in place at these steakhouses, some of the employees objected to it on the grounds that it was not transparent and improperly divided tips among the workers.  Employees were told not to complain or talk to each other about the tip pool and were told that doing so would endanger their jobs.  Despite the employer later attempting to provide some clarity as to how the tips were being divided, rancor still existed among some employees.  At one point, the employees were told by a general manager that some employees that had been talking about the tip pool were “cleared out” and the employer would continue to do so. In the Advice Memorandum, it was noted that emplo
Post a Comment
Read more

What I’ve Been Reading This Week

A few years ago, I remember when the “Fight for $15” movement was taking off around the country.  Lo and behold, it appears that a $15/hour minimum wage is not the stopping point, which should be no surprise.  As the below article notes, New York is aggressively moving to ramp up hourly wage rates even higher.  While all the  below articles are worth a read, I called particular attention to that one. As always, below are a couple article that caught my eye this week. Disney World Workers Reject Latest Contract Offer Late last week, it was announced that workers at Disney World had rejected the most recent contract offer from the company, calling on their employer to do better.  As Brooks Barnes at The New York Times writes, the unions that represent about 32,000 workers at Disney World reported their members resoundingly rejected the 5 year contract offer which would have seen workers receive a 10% raise and retroactive increased back pay.  While Disney’s offer would have increased pa
Post a Comment
Read more

Utah Non-Compete Bill Falters in House

Last month, a non-compete bill sponsored by Representative Brian Greene (Republican from Pleasant Grove) & up for vote in the Utah House failed to make it through the Legislature.  The bill sought to ban enforcement of non-competes if they came after a worker was already employed, given no compensation (such as a bonus or promotion) for signing the non-compete, and laid off within six months.  However, by a 22 - 49 vote, the bill was resoundingly defeated after some business groups lobbied to kill the non-compete bill.  One group in particular, The Free Enterprise Utah coalition, argued that the Utah State Legislature should hold off on any changes to non compete laws in the state until a survey about non competes was done among Utah businesses.  Representative Greene had countered this claim and argued that a survey was not needed to show that the current non compete laws in the states allowed many businesses, including some small high tech companies in the state, to per
Post a Comment
Read more