
Company gives non-smokers six days holiday to compensate for cigarette breaks - sjcsjc
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japanese-firm-piala-inc-tokyo-non-smokers-extra-six-days-holiday-cigarette-break-a8028541.html
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athenot
As a non-smoker I used to go on the smoke breaks with coworkers. Not as an
excuse for time away from work but rather to get up and brainstorm things.
That turned out to be more productive than stay seated and let my wheels spin
in my brain.

Nowadays we use the coffee/watercooler break but it's not quite the same as
getting out of the building, feeling the outside air against the skin (hot or
cold) and getting a change of scenery. We've tries the walk around the parking
lot thing, but most office buildings are really not set up for walking
spaces...

~~~
amai
You know about the dangers of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_smoking)
?

~~~
dionidium
It's indicative of the hysteria around secondhand smoke that someone on HN
could seriously think that occasionally standing _near_ people smoking
_outside_ is a serious health risk.

~~~
loco5niner
I take it seriously enough that I hold my breath while walking past someone
smoking.

~~~
fasquoika
That's honestly ridiculous. I'd understand if you just don't like the smell,
but there's no real health risk involved in walking past someone smoking

~~~
loco5niner
I agree. It is ridiculous. But it's also ridiculous for someone to polute the
air in a public space (it's different if they are off somewhere I can easily
avoid by walking a different way). And yes, I also do not like the smell, but
it's both. I also have minor breathing problems that I don't want aggravated.

------
bryanlarsen
Does the company have a culture of encouraging people to actually take those
holidays? Based on my experience in Japan, nobody actually uses their holiday
time, to avoid losing face at work. The only holidays people actually take are
the public holidays. Luckily, they have a good number of them, including a
whole week at the beginning of May.

~~~
mattmanser
UK's nothing like Japan, most people use all of their holiday.

~~~
CalRobert
FTA: "Company based on 29th floor of Tokyo.."

~~~
mattmanser
Whoops, the co.uk threw me.

------
Raphmedia
I've never understood this. Don't everyone get the same breaks? Are smokers
considered as having a health condition and thus granted extra breaks?

It's not as if the boss came in one day and told people "Everyone gets 2 x 15
minutes of breaks a day. Except for smokers, you guys can take all the breaks
you want."

If my employer gives me 2 x 15 minutes of breaks a day, I'll take those even
if I don't smoke.

~~~
irl_zebra
Well, smokers randomly leave for smoke breaks several times daily. Non smokers
don’t do that. So smokers get more breaks, even if non smokers could step
outside for 15 minutes at a time theoretically. Also it’s socially acceptable
for smokers to do this, less so for non smokers to randomly leave for breaks.
Can you explain what you’re not getting?

~~~
Raphmedia
Perhaps some difference between countries or companies.

Everywhere I have worked the breaks were defined in the work contract. Right
under my salaries, benefits, etc. I have a clause that more or less says: "You
are entitled to take a 30-minute break after working five consecutive hours.
This 30 minutes can be split through the day but not used to leave early or
lengthen your lunch break."

Anyone taking more breaks than that will simply be fired.

The only exception being bathroom breaks because let's face it, we are all
adult enough not to need to ask a supervisor to take a leak. I use this time
to brew and enjoy a coffee in the lounge in the morning and to take a walk
around the office during the afternoon. A smoker would probably split those 30
minutes into 6 cigarette breaks and that's fine.

Nobody gets extra breaks because they smoke. Is this different elsewhere?

~~~
paulriddle
It's insanity. If I found myself working for such an employer I would
immediately label them as my enemy and nope the hell out of there as soon as
possible. I wouldn't talk with my friends or family, I wouldn't watch youtube
or TV series, I wouldn't even walk - I would always run, as a character in a
videogame, and I would chew my food very fast looking nowhere but the dish I'm
eating. All of that just to squeeze out as much time as possible to getting
out. You can't have positive relationships with someone who monitors your
breaks.

~~~
Raphmedia
(Quebec, Canada) I've never seen it done any other ways.

As a developer, I get to work for some pretty relax workplaces. At those
places, the breaks are not monitored but you are expected to respect the
limit. 30 minutes of paid lunch (and 30 more minutes of unpaid lunch if you
choose to) and 15 minutes of paid break in the morning along with 15 minutes
of paid break in the evening. Note that by law, employers here are only
required to give you an unpaid 30-minute break for every 5 hours of work. What
I am describing here is living the good life as a developer.

Even then, most developer at big agencies (100+ programmers) here work by the
clock & timesheet and have to log their worktime to the minute and are unpaid
the missed time.

Perhaps I should put emphasis on the fact that those are paid breaks I'm
talking about.

I guess that you could "disappear" every hours but the culture would make it
so that your coworkers would start to ask questions, your supervisor start to
worry, you yearly evaluation suffer and your bonus or salary increase might be
lower than the previous year.

I am lucky enough to work somewhere pretty relax with a "startup" culture.
This allows me to start at the time I want and leave at the time I want. That
being said, I'm expected to do 7.5 hours every day, to be present between 9h
and 15h and to respect the allowed time when taking breaks.

> I wouldn't talk with my friends or family, I wouldn't watch youtube or TV
> series, I wouldn't even walk

Are you doing those things on the clock? I'm confused.

------
mmcconnell1618
This assumes people are working just because they aren't on a smoke break. If
you work on a production line in a factory, it's fairly easy to see the output
level of your work. If you work in an office, there is not a simple measure.
The non-smoking worker could just as easily spend the same time chatting it up
around the water cooler.

Physical presence does not equal working time. I wish more managers understood
that motivated workers will work and non-motivated workers will always find
the path of least resistance. Remote or in-office doesn't matter that much.

~~~
stronglikedan
Not to mention the amount of problems that are solved over a cigarette. I
don't know if it was placebo, or a mental jolt from the nicotine, but I've
come up with many a solution on a cigarette break. I don't smoke any more
(thankfully), but when I did it at work, I was usually thinking of a work
problem, and thus working.

~~~
majewsky
Yeah, this has nothing to do with the smoking. Just the fact that you allow
your mind to wander. The same effect can be had from taking a shower.

~~~
wott
Double the effect if you smoke outside in Britain.

~~~
majewsky
I see what you did there. :)

------
megaman22
Good. I used to work a blue-collar, industrial job, and was really tempted to
buy a cheap pack of cigs, as a dummy so I could tag along and take a non-
smoking break with the smokers. By the time they hoofed from wherever they
were working to the designated smoking area, burned one down, and walked back,
20-30 minutes of every hour could get chewed up.

~~~
brango
Why not just go for a non-smoking break without any pretence?

~~~
jacobush
A slacker hated by both the addicts and the non using? Nah... gotta have your
social support structure in place

~~~
wavefunction
And you can always further leverage the situation by bumming smokes to the
actual smokers.

------
Clubber
Based on what we know about staying seated for hours a day, it would be more
beneficial to allow non-smokers stand up and walk around breaks every hour
rather than 6 days off.

~~~
humanrebar
Is it? That may be true, but I read about new (to me) contradictory research
in this area a lot. I feel the science should be more settled before we start
designing specific policy proposals.

~~~
wojt_eu
Research that contradicts benefits of frequent physical activity for office
workers? Paint me surprised. Can you share some links?

~~~
jamesrcole
I'm pretty sure I remember reading that the effects of sitting were not, they
believe, offset by physical activity. I can't remember the source, but I'm
sure there's stuff out there in Google.

~~~
sdiupIGPWEfh
Pretty sure I remember those same studies. More or less, I believe it was that
the effects of sitting all day were not offset by physical activity after work
or on weekends. The conclusions were not that taking breaks from sitting have
no positive effect.

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5555624
Years ago, the non-smokers in my group would go out to breakfast every Friday,
to make up for smoke breaks. It was just two blocks down the street to a fast
food joint, so it didn't make up for all the time someone might spend on a
smoke break during the; but, it stopped people from complaining about time
lost due to smoke breaks. (Maybe it wasn't healthier, either.)

------
rectang
My grandfather started smoking (back in the 1920s?) because as a dock worker
he was not allowed to take breaks but was also not allowed to smoke on the
ship.

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leroy_masochist
Given the amount of walking needed to get outside the building and the
sedentary nature of their job, it's worth considering whether, on balance, the
smokers at this company are actually healthier and more productive than they
would be if they kicked the habit.

~~~
ideonexus
This is the point I wanted to bring up. As a pack-a-day smoker for 10 years, I
got up from my desk for 10 minutes every 1.5 hours to smoke a cigarette.
Later, as a non-smoker, a health-conscious manager told me he wanted me to get
up from my desk once an hour to take a five-minute walk around the building
for my health. Regular breaks during the day are better for your health than
vacation days; although, both are good for your health.

~~~
peterburkimsher
I walk to the water cooler or toilet every 2 hours, and take a longer break to
watch the sunset in the evening if the weather's suitable. Perhaps I drink a
lot of water compared to most, but the last I heard was that medical advice is
to drink more water.

------
mc32
On the one hand this appears fair, on the other hand it implies a kind of
Taylorist take on time and time management. This could make sense in a manual
labor intensive job, but not much in most office jobs where it's harder to
attribute productivity to discreet amounts of time.

------
drinchev
Cigarette break is not a break every time. You usually can't stop thinking
about work for the 10 minutes you spend outside. It's quite the opposite.

Smoking break usually shifts you the direction of thinking and you solve a
problem probably faster. Not because of the cigarettes itself, but because of
the environment change.

This whole idea sounds like "People without social media accounts are allowed
1 more day off, because they don't spend time on checking their facebook
messages."

~~~
nik736
For us developers this might be true, but I also know people who just smoke
every hour, they stop doing what they are doing just to get their cig... and
that's everything but effective.

------
jasonkostempski
Wouldn't it be easier to just rename them "breaks"?

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wmantly
Where I work, if the smoke break isn't solo, it's a meeting. We even take non-
smokers that would be relevant to the conversation. Sometimes us smokers are
the only single to non-smokers that maybe you should get up for a few minutes.
I use to work in windows building, after my first few days my co-worker who
doesn't smoke thanked me for being smoker, he worked there for about a year
prior and never knew when he should get up and go outside, I gave him that
guidance.

Every job I have worked that isn't hourly, break times are not monitored. If
you have something during the work day, just go, if you want to walk around
the park and clear your mind, have fun, need a smoke, shit have 2. So long
your not screwing something up timing wise.

Also, it seems to me that the people who complain about such things have
unimportant roles...

------
shafyy
I can see where this is coming from. Still, I don't think it's a good
approach. For example, some people take 30min per day to take a shit during
work time. Other people don't take a shit at all or shit very quickly (2-3
min). Some people pee 5 times during work, while others once. You get my
point. Where to draw the line?

------
TheVinous
It really depends on the company culture, but in a lot of cases, going for a
cigarette break is not equivalent with taking time away from your work. There
are a lot of brainstorming and work related discussion can happen, jut like in
a tea or coffee break.

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ehnto
I don't know if it's like this in all companies in Australia, but we take
coffee breaks and those happily make up for cigarette breaks. Some smokers
come on the walk to the coffee place and smoke outside while we get coffee,
two birds with one stone I guess.

Some context though, Australia has a fairly great coffee culture, we have even
been described as coffee elitists. So while the frugal and indifferent will
use the office coffee machine to get a fix, it seems to be pretty well
understood that it's not great coffee and you have to venture out to get the
good stuff.

~~~
amai
What about the people who neither smoke nor drink coffee?

~~~
ehnto
When they say, "Hey we're going for coffee, want to come?" you could reply
"Sure, I'll come for the walk!".

I don't think anyone is going to call you out, it would be quite hypocritical
of them.

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throwaway2016a
When I worked for a larger company people would routinely take gym breaks (the
gym was right down the hallway) which took the place of smoking breaks. Sure
you can't get a huge workout in in a 15 minute break but you can get the heart
rate up.

In the US I'm not even sure it is legal to provide different benefits to
individual employees than the rest of the company. But one thing I can say for
sure is that if this was in the US most people wouldn't take the days. Most
people I know don't even take the days they have :(

~~~
ehnto
I feel like you would spend 10-15 minutes just getting changed, showering and
all that. Or potentially smell the rest of the day. I guess it worked though.

~~~
throwaway2016a
Not all workouts build up a sweat. Specifically weight exercises. At the same
time, I did say "get the heart rate up" which implied cardio which was perhaps
a poor chose of words.

------
baldfat
As a non-coffee drinker can I get ten days?????

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draw_down
This stuff just strikes me as very petty. Something about smoking or smokers
just drives people a bit crazy. Before she retired, my mom would regularly
bitch to me about the smoke breaks her coworkers took. She’d say “maybe I’d
like to just go outside for a little walk”. So do it then!

The smoking is bad of course, but the specific focus on it, to me, feels
pretty hinky.

How about taking breaks every once in a while because you work hard, and
you’re a human, not a robot? That should be ok without the passive-aggressive
framing.

I dunno. Just seems a bit “off” to me.

~~~
wlesieutre
The reason your mom was complaining is that if she just went outside for a
little walk, she'd probably get written up and eventually fired because only
smokers are allowed to take those breaks at most workplaces. If you have a
boss who's more fair about it, that's great, but I don't think it's typical.

This is especially true for places on timeclocks, probably less if you're
salaried.

~~~
draw_down
Sorry, I don’t buy it. I think people tell themselves that to justify why
those evil smokers have hearted the system! Obviously it is ok to take a break
if people are taking breaks to smoke.

~~~
wlesieutre
I agree with you, but just because it's obvious to you or me doesn't mean it's
obvious to anyone else.

Have you never had a manager who enjoyed micromanaging and enforcing rules
pointlessly?

If you haven't personally, have you never even _heard_ of someone else having
such a manager?

If a company wants to have breaks for smokers only, there's nothing stopping
them: [http://www.hrhero.com/hl/articles/2015/07/31/are-for-
smokers...](http://www.hrhero.com/hl/articles/2015/07/31/are-for-smokers-only-
breaks-unfair-maybe-but-usually-not-illegal/)

