I always enjoy it when someone shows ignorance of my beliefs/position, attempting to straw man them and paint them as absolute, even thought it is obvious that they are not. Usually it demonstrates a sign of losing the debate... as you have.
I always enjoy shooting a debater's favorite tactics back at them. You tend to deploy the "you're dogmatic" and "you're seeing things as black and white" quite a bit as a means of tailoring the direction of the debate to terms that you find favorable. Such declarations, absent proof, are pretty vacuous.
Anyways, on to business.
You are prepared to punish someone who has done nothing wrong. If the employee had had a DUI, or had come to work drunk or smelling of alcohol, I could see your point. None of these things happened.
It is not I who is punishing this employee, that process is both self-inflicted and imposed on him by the company. I simply support the company's right to do what it feels is in its best interests.
The employee could have sought treatment on his own. In fact, if I was in his shoes that's exactly what I would have done in order to preserve the privacy of my condition and not broadcast it to all of my coworkers and to my employers. That would have saved the company a huge headache, for even if he did cause an accident in the future, the fact that the company didn't know he was an alcoholic would remove the ability of plaintiffs to charge negligence regarding the company hiring the driver and continuing to use him as a driver after they knew he was an alcoholic.
An early girlfriend of mine didn't want her parents to know that she was taking birth control pills so rather than using her parent's medical insurance to obtain the pills, we paid for them in cash.
The point here is that once the admission is out on the table, the company can't escape the liability that develops from knowing about the disability. Politicians use this all the time - plausible deniability.
Btw, do you know what the relapse rate for folks that remain in treatment is? 10% Pretty low.
That's good to read but it conflicts with the information that I have available to me. Here, I'll show you mine and then you can show me yours.
Rates and predictors of relapse after natural and treated remission from alcohol use disorders
In a meta-analysis of alcoholism treatment outcome studies, average
short-term abstinence rates were 21% for untreated individuals in waiting-list, no-treatment or placebo conditions,
compared to 43% for treated individuals [2,7]. Similarly, Weisner, Matzger & Kaskutas [8] found that treated alcohol-dependent individuals had higher 1-year non-problem use outcomes (40% versus 23%) than did untreated individuals. Overall, these studies suggest that, especially among individuals who recognize their alcohol problems, treated individuals achieve higher remission rates than do untreated individuals.
The way I read the above seems to indicate a 60% relapse rate rather than a 10% relapse rate. Now it might be possible that the way to reconcile these two rates can be found in the condition you attach pertaining to alcoholics remaining "in treatment" but with a trucker being on the move all over the country, remaining "in treatment" for the rest of his career seems to pose a bit of a problem.
Secondly, my understanding of this process is that successful treatment often involves the alcoholic having a strong support system readily available. Being isolated and on the road removes an alcoholic from ready access to the people who help him over the tough spots. The research points to support systems as being instrumental in maintaining sobriety:
More social resources, especially supportive relationships with family members and friends, are associated with both treated and untreated remission [15,25,26]. More reliance on approach coping and less on avoidance coping also is linked to a higher likelihood of remission [27-29]. In addition, compared to individuals who remit with help, those who remit without help tend to have more supportive family relationships and to rely less on avoidance coping [20,30].
Your dogmatism prevents you from looking at solutions. Blame and punish the worker. That's all you know. Your argument does not consider both parts of the problem. Mine does. Since all you can see is black/white, it is necessary for you to falsely paint my position as black/white.
No, your position does not adequately consider both parts of the problem. You making very definite statements about liability protection which you can't back up. You're writing checks that your account can't cover. I've seen no evidence that a company instituting a random screening process will indemnify them from risk. You stating such a position carries absolutely no weight with anyone but you. You can con yourself that you're looking at both sides but you're simply succumbing to a confirmation bias here - you want to believe that your pronouncements are conclusive because that enables you to more one step further in your argument. If you actually grappled with the issues and found that your pronouncements were not conclusive then you'd have to revise your argument or simple jettison the pretense that your position is a thoughtful compromise between two competing interests.
This company is exposing itself to liability. I'm telling you that. Others are telling you that. I linked to lawsuits and settlements which demonstrate that. You use declarations from Mount Olympus to disqualify arguments that you don't want to address. The fact that you don't want to entertain these arguments/evidence or engage them doesn't tell us anything about the validity of the arguments and evidence, it simply tells us how you deal with points that raise difficulty for your position.
The EEOC is preventing rampant abuses of the company. That's what would happen without regulations like these.
If such cases were rampant before the EEOC made its ruling, then this case wouldn't be so newsworthy, so clearly there have been no rampant abuses by companies. This case is so newsworthy because the rampant abuse of power is coming from the EEOC enforcing cartoonish levels of paternalism in demanding that a company reinstate an admitted alcoholic into his previous position of being a truck driver - taking the protection of "victims" and protecting their "rights" to extreme ends.
No, the dogmatic libertarian position, which you seem to be spouting, dictates "might makes right". The company has the might, so they're automatically right.
Now that is a clear case of black/white thinking for nowhere have I employed any reference to might makes right. If anyone is employing the might makes right strategy it is the EEOC which is using the power of government to enforce its unpopular will which elevates the "right" of an alcoholic over the safety of the public. Secondly, North Carolina is a state with at-will employment standards so the notion that an employee has a "right" to a particular job has no basis in fact. The employee doesn't own that job, he's not owed that job and the only thing giving him a leg to stand on is the might of the EEOC declaring otherwise.
This company is not acting on some malicious whim, it is acting in its own self-interest, thereby protecting the interests of all stakeholders in the company who would be harmed if this employee does cause an accident and it's acting in the interests of increasing public safety by lowering the risk of accident for the general public.
See, this is the essence of the problem with the libertarian position and why IT is "pie-in-the-sky". It forgets simple human psychology, that, if given the opportunity, an person or company will screw over anyone to get ahead, regardless of how it impacts anyone or anything else... even themselves over the long term. Now, you might want to adhere to this position, but I do not. I find that the ability of folks to work together to find reasonable solutions far more practical and productive.
This rant of yours is the essence of the problem with liberalism - the lack of analytic reasoning and the over-reliance on emotion and rooting for the underdog when such rooting cannot be defended. Your primary focus is on the welfare of the driver but you give no consideration to a.) the owners of the company, b.) the public, and c.) the workers of the company who run the risk of serious harm if this company is held liable for an accident caused by this driver.
I'll leave all of the self-serving flattery unaddressed for we're all entitled to maintaining our little delusions.
