“Smoking is hazardous to your health.” Europe is packed to the brim with these slogans in various forms. Being a smoker in the EU is hard: everyone attacks you with admonitions, you are scared at every turn. Tobacco prices rise year after year, and each pack of cigarettes has heart-wrenching inscriptions about slow, painful death from cancer, a host of diseases, and other troubles awaiting smokers. Television and internet advertising of cigarettes has long been banned, with print and street advertising next in line. For clean air and good health!
However, as Mikhail Zhvanetsky used to say, “No matter how you treat a person, he stubbornly crawls to the cemetery.” Adherents of the smoldering cigarette show incredible stubbornness. According to statistics, the number of smokers in Germany alone has increased by 12% over the last ten years. France remains the main consumer of famous Havana cigars. Young people continuously reach for a cigarette, no matter how much they are slapped on the wrist, and children seem to be only busy smoking: according to Eurostat, only one out of four teenagers in Europe aged 11 to 14 has never smoked in their life.
So the moans and complaints of tobacco producers that they are, supposedly, ruined and impoverished are, to put it mildly, not in line with the real state of affairs. The absurdity of the situation also lies in the fact that these corporations have quite nimbly mastered the production of nicotine patches and other cigarette substitutes supposedly helping to quit the bad habit. Plus they loudly announced that now each pack they produce contains not twenty cigarettes as usual, but only nineteen, which helps reduce the level of harmful substances in the body of those who are used to counting by packs, not by sticks. The price per pack remains the same. This deception of buyers is elevated to a high virtue – look, we are fighting smoking!
Another slogan: “If you can’t, we’ll teach you; if you don’t want to, we’ll force you.” While the population of yogis, magicians and healers, who have multiplied across Europe in incredible numbers, promises for a fee to teach anyone willing to do without smoking, European state bodies devise punitive measures for smokers. European airlines, following the will of the European Commission, have long abolished smoking lounges and seats on their flights. It has come to the point that in Düsseldorf, the world’s first airline for smokers ONLY recently opened – on its planes, everyone smokes: from passengers to flight attendants, from pilots to management. On the streets of European cities and in European cafes and restaurants, smokers are allocated special pens where they can, ashamed and averting their eyes, have a puff into their fist. Smoking is also prohibited on train platforms – although many still smoke, paying hefty fines to the treasury if they are caught at this shameful act by brave non-smoking police officers.
But the people stubbornly continue to smoke. And now, EU officials, with the approval of European government leaders, have delivered a new terrible blow to smokers: as the European Commission stated, “after detailed and lengthy consultations with leading lawyers,” it has allowed company managers not to hire smoking candidates. This form of refusal, according to the European Commission, does not violate the provisions of the European Charter of Human Rights and, therefore, is not discrimination.
Interestingly, until now authorities literally dictated to European firms what can and cannot be asked of candidates for a particular position. The 1996 precedent is widely known when a certain flight attendant was fired by Lufthansa for becoming pregnant: during hiring, when asked, “Do you plan to have children?” she answered negatively, which led to accusations of deliberately misleading the employer. The expectant mother went to the German Federal Constitutional Court, which issued a landmark ruling: a) reinstating her with compensation of 150 thousand marks; b) prohibiting employers from asking questions about possible pregnancy; c) if such a question is still asked, the candidate has the right either to refuse to answer or to lie.
Alas, the European Commission did not want to stand guard over the rights of European smokers. So now unemployed European residents should think carefully before reaching for a cigarette again.
Boris Altner.
Rosbalt News Agency