If you run your own business or company, you may ask your employees to complete drug tests during the application and interviewing process. This can streamline the hiring process, helping you quickly sift through the candidate pool to find the viable candidates. You may find a use for drug testing later on in your employees’ careers, though, if any injuries occur on the job. When one of your employees is injured on the job, you are within your rights to require that employee, and your other employees, to complete a random drug test. When this happens, look to a reliable toxicology testing lab that won’t mix up or contaminate results – a lab like Texas Genetic Labs, LLC. We’ll help your El Paso, Texas, business conduct painless and professional random drug tests that will help you keep your company from being affected by employee drug use.
Drug Testing After On-the-Job Injuries
When an employee is harmed on the job, it’s natural to wonder how exactly they were injured. Although it would be convenient if every employee were 100% honest about how their work injury occurred, it’s always better to be safe, checking to be sure that no drug use affected or caused a work-related accident. When you decide to drug test your employees, you can make the decision to conduct a drug test for only the employees involved in an accident or for all of your employees. Although many employers choose to test only those who were injured or played a role in a work injury, random drug testing every employee when something like this happens can be beneficial in the long run, lessening the likelihood of future incidents.
Requiring Drug Tests for Workers’ Compensation
Oftentimes, employers wonder whether they are legally allowed to drug test their employees if they’ve been in a work-related accident and are filing for workers’ compensation. The answer is a very loud “YES.” This is not discrimination, and it’s not an attempt to get out of paying workers’ compensation to employees who are eligible. A toxicology test will simply help you, as an employer, get closer to understanding how an accident occurred, letting you say conclusively that drugs weren’t involved or that they may have actually caused or affected the injury or incident. If you do find that your employees involved in a work-related accident were using drugs at the time of the incident, this is grounds for a dismissal of a workers’ compensation case, as long as the drugs in use did directly affect the accident somehow.
In protecting yourself and your company, you should keep in mind that, although employees can refuse to be drug tested, as their employer, you are able to let employees go if they refuse a random drug test. This includes any employees who were not involved in a work injury. If you’re looking to conduct random drug tests at your El Paso, Texas, company, contact Texas Genetic Labs, LLC at (877) 375-2165.