A new study among unemployed job seekers in the San Francisco Bay Area is suggesting that those who smoke will find it harder to get a job, and when they do find employment, they are likely to make less money than their non-smoking counterparts.
The study, cited on Reuters and reported in the JAMA Internal Medicine, found that non-smokers were 30 percent more likely to find a job within a year of entering the study that those who were smokers.
Lead author on the study Judith Prochaska, from the Stanford Prevention Research Center in California, said the evidence shows that not only does smoking harm you physically, it can damage your financial well-being also.
Earlier studies have noted links between smoking and being unemployed, but that research did not indicate whether the participants were smokers before losing their jobs, or if they decided to take up smoking after they became unemployed.
This particular study recruited 251 unemployed people, 131 of which were daily smokers and 120 who said they were non-smokers, over a period from 2013 to 2015. From that group, 217 reported back after a year, with 56 percent of non-smokers reporting they had found work, and only 27 percent of the smokers saying they were now employed.
The results also show that the smokers were making about $5 an hour less than the non-smokers reporting for the study. Adjustments were made for the influences on employment, such as housing, transportation and criminal history, but the refined data still showed a 24 percent difference in the rates of employment at the end of the year.
The study authors also noted evidence that smokers tend to take more sick days than non-smokers, and are more likely to be distracted on the job.
Prochaska pointed out that the study was confined to the San Francisco area, where smoking is less common due to workplace restrictions, and may not be indicative of other areas across the country where smoking is more commonplace. She warns the differences may not be as striking in those areas at this time, but as smoking rates continue to decline across the country, these numbers are likely to become more relevant in the future.
The research team say they now plan to conduct an randomized controlled trial to test the theory that a cessation of smoking plan can reduce the time a person is unemployed.