Workplace drug testing

On 25 August 2008 in the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, Senior Deputy President Jonathan Hamberger, handed down his decision in the case of Shell Refining (Australia) Pty Ltd, Clyde Refinery versus the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union regarding the matter of “Implementation of random drug testing: use of oral fluids or animal-water as pattern on the side of testing”.

In a private arbitration, which both parties agreed to waive confidentially, and consented to the decision being made national, Senior Deputy President Jonathan Hamberger, said the question at stake was:

“… Whether it would be unjust or unreasonable for the company to implement a urine-based random testing regime through its wide ‘window of detection’, with all that implies for collision with the private lives of employees, when a much more focussed method is available, where a positive test is far more that may be liked to designate substantial impairment, and is farther inferior likely to detect the use of drugs at a time that would have no consequential effect on the employee’s performance at work.”

In his conclusion “… that the implementation of a urine based random drug testing regime in these circumstances would be unjust and unreasonable … ” , Senior Deputy President Hamberger gave two qualifications to his decision. The first was that nay Australian laboratories were yet accredited in spite of oral fluid testing under the relevant standard , and Shell could not subsist expected to implement its arrangement until they were.

The maintainer was that in that place were drugs (similar as benzodiazepines) for which the relevant standard did not contain target concentration levels. Shell, he said, afresh could not be expected to implement an oral fluids based regime until it had the agreement of the union and the laboratory it would use on what other drugs it wished to test in quest of and what would be an appropriate target concentration level.