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cannot afford to take a hard line against off-duty marijuana usage if they want to hire.”
That’s particularly true in Colorado’s resort areas, where hotels and ski lifts are heavily staffed with young workers, Graves said: “They can lose their jobs and walk across the street and get another one.”
FPI, a property-management firm in San Francisco that employs 2,900 around the country, from leasing managers to groundskeepers, has dozens of jobs listed on online boards. Its ads say applicants must pass a “full background check and drug screening.”
But it adds, “As it relates to marijuana use, FPI will consider any applicable state law when dispositioning test results.”
FPI didn’t respond to requests for comment, which isn’t unusual given that companies that have dropped marijuana tests aren’t exactly billboarding their deci- sions. Most still seek to maintain drug-free workplaces and still test for harder drugs.
“They’re pretty hush-hush about it,” Graves said.
AutoNation, which operates dealerships in 17 states, is one of the few that have gone public. The company stopped testing for marijuana about a year ago. Marc Cannon, a company spokesman, said it did so mostly in response to evolving public attitudes. But it also feared losing prospec-
tive employees.
“The labor market has tightened up,”
Cannon said.
AutoNation heard from other business
leaders, Cannon said. They said things like, “’We’re doing the same thing; we just didn’t want to share it publicly.’”
Relaxed attitudes among employers are spreading from states where recreational marijuana is legal to those where it’s lawful only for medical use, such as Michigan and New Hampshire.
Janis Petrini, who owns an Express Em- ployment staffing agency in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says that with the area’s unem- ployment rate below 3 percent, employers are growing desperate. Some are willing to ignore the results of drug tests performed by Express, which still screens for mar- ijuana and won’t place workers who test positive.
“We have had companies say to us, ‘We don’t worry about that as much as we used to,’” Petrini said. “We say, ‘OK, well, we are still following our standards.’ “
One of Reidy’s clients, a manufacturer in New Hampshire, has dropped mar- ijuana testing because it draws some workers from neighboring Massachusetts and Maine, which have legalized pot for recreational use. Another client, which runs assisted living facilities from Florida to Maine, has stopped testing its house-
keeping and food service workers for marijuana.
The stigma surrounding marijuana use is eroding, compounding pressure on em- ployers to stop testing. Sixty-four percent of Americans support legalizing pot, a Gallup poll found, the highest percentage in a half-century of surveys.
In Las Vegas, where recreational use is legal, marijuana dispensaries “look almost like Apple stores,” said Thoran Towler, CEO of the Nevada Association of Em- ployers.
Many high-tech companies have been moving from California to Nevada to escape California’s high costs, and they’re seeking workers. Towler says the most common question from his 400 member executives is, “Where do I find employ- ees?”
He estimates that roughly one-tenth of his group’s members have stopped testing for marijuana out of frustration.
“They say, ‘I have to get people on the casino floor or make the beds, and I can’t worry about what they’re doing in their spare time,’” Towler said.
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Contact Chris Rugaber on Twitter at http://Twitter.com/ChrisRugaber
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Follow AP’s marijuana coverage here: https://apnews.com/tag/LegalMarijuana
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