State Tobacco law

I recently lost my job.

I am having a hard time comprehending why.

I am having an even harder time understanding why the state after having first approved my unemployment benefit later rescinded the decision after an appeal from my former employer.

The law and policy that I was terminated for appearantly violating is the tobacco law.

I did not violate this law.

I did nothing that I could be arrested for.

I did not violate the stores policy in regards to this law.

Yet I have been terminated, and my only source of income taken from be because I was not accurately able to guess someones age.

The reason I lost my job is because I live in a place where the government will not get out of the business of raising our children. Because they have no way of penalizing parents who do not know what their children are doing they have placed the responsibility of controlling the children’s actions on store personnel, bar tenders and schoolteachers.

The state I live and work in currently has a tobacco law in place that requires store personnel to check ID for customers under the age of 27. It is legal to sell tobacco to anyone over the age of 18 but they must appear to be over 27 to not be carded. Now on the surface this may seem to be perfectly reasonable as I am sure everyone understands the need to discourage our youth from smoking, but when you take a deeper look into what the law requires it quickly becomes evident that sooner or later every person that works in this field will lose their job over this law.

 This law requires that any retailer who engages in the sale of tobacco must set up a compliance program that incorporates a once monthly compliance check of each store owned by the company. It also requires that companies employ an outside company to perform the checks and that company may use any person up to the age of 26-years & 364 days old to administer the check. The company administering the compliance check is allowed to instruct their employees on how to dress and make them selves appear older than they actually are. They are also allowed to instruct their employees to wait until the store is full of people and the store associates are busy as h*ll to administer the check.  Retailers are further more required to terminate any employee who fails 2 compliance checks in a 24month period.

Now setting aside the fact that I am not a circus performer or a side show act whose job it is to guess peoples ages lets focus on the other no win situations this stupid law imposes on store personnel.

1. How in the world do you have any way of knowing weather or not someone is of 26-years & 364 days old or 27?
2. Why, if I have not committed a crime enforceable by law, can I be fired?
3. Why, if the law prohibits sales to persons under 18, should I be responsible for carding adults?
4. How can the state assume that if I fail to accurately guess how old some one is that I failed to adhere to the policy?
5. When the compliance checkers are permitted to alter their appearance to intentionally bait store personnel why is this not entrapment?
6. The instruction to ID everyone who appears to be under 27 is asking store personnel to form an opinion of that persons age right?
7. How can the state or anyone else for that matter, tell me what my opinion of 27 is?

And finally why is it the responsibility of store associates to make sure that other people’s children are not buying tobacco?

Now I would really love to be able to blame the company for being terminated but the fact is that it is not their fault. They have done exactly as they are required to do by law and it would be unfair of me to place any blame on them right?

Wrong!

As I have said I filed for and received unemployment compensation. The states position was that even though I failed the compliance check that is not proof that I failed to adhere to the policy. The company immediately appealed this finding. They claimed that I willfully violated the policy because it was my second failure in 22 months.  First, second or 36^th failure, I ask again how can they dictate to me what my opinion is, and how in the world can I be first fired and then denied unemployment benefits for forming an opinion that they instructed me to make?

The government’s position on making store personnel responsible for kids buying tobacco, bartenders responsible for minors purchasing alcohol, or schoolteachers responsible for what kids do to and from school (Yep this state does that too!)  is seriously messed up. The responsibility for all of these things should lie with the parents and yet the state continually re-enforces the acceptance of bad parenting by pushing these responsibilities off onto others.

 Don't misunderstand me. It is not my intention to support children smoking or drinking. I just believe that my livelihood should not be placed in jeopardy because other people lack the skill or caring to parent their own children. If law enforcement personnel catch children in possession of tobacco or alcohol take them home and deal with their parents.

Keeping any job in America is not an easy thing. We really do not need the state imposing unrealistic expectations on blue collar workers to enforce ridiculous laws that they are not capable of enforcing.