Smoking May Lead To More Unemployment And Lower Salaries

If you don't have a job or earn less than you think you should, you can probably blame it on one habit that you love---smoking!

Researchers from Stanford University found that smokers do not find jobs quickly and earn much less than colleagues who do not smoke.

Earlier studies in the United States and Europe linked smoking to unemployment, with lead researcher Judith Prochaska and her team finding that job seekers in California were more likely to be smokers. It is not clear, though, whether smoking was the cause or effect of unemployment.

"You don't know if smokers have a harder time finding work or if smokers are more likely to lose their jobs - or that when nonsmokers lose their jobs, they become stressed and start to smoke," said  Prochaska, an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical Center.

Examining 131 unemployed smokers and 120 unemployed nonsmokers at the beginning of the study at six months and then after 12 months made the experts arrive at some conclusions.

"We found that smokers had a much harder time finding work than nonsmokers," said Prochaska.

Just 27 percent of smokers had found jobs compared with 56 percent of nonsmokers by the end of the study. Smokers who landed jobs in one year earned on average $5 less per hour than their nonsmoking counterparts.

"The health harms of smoking have been established for decades, and our study here provides insight into the financial harms of smoking both in terms of lower re-employment success and lower wages," Prochaska added.

With survey answers and breath test results, Prochaska and her team noted that smokers tended to be on average younger, less educated and in poorer health than non-smokers.

"We designed this study's analyses so that the smokers and nonsmokers were as similar as possible in terms of the information we had on their employment records and prospects for employment at baseline," said Michael Baiocchi, an assistant professor of medicine at Stanford University Medical Center, who co-authored the study.

The findings were published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.