I talked about men possibly preferring women who make less money than they do, and if your weight affects how much you earn.
But how about smoking?
onkel_wart
From Barking up the wrong tree, I bring you the answer:
NO.
Smoking does not make you more money.
Non-smokers make 15% – 40% more.
The researchers’ primary interest was tracking wages after respondents started their first jobs, and they found a clear correlation between wage growth and smoking.
Munasinghe and Sicherman found a 4.7 percent gap (after controlling for a range of family and individual characteristics) between smokers’ and nonsmokers’ first wages (what people were paid at their first full-time job).
Though this result was consistent with many previous findings that smokers earn less than nonsmokers, earlier studies didn’t take wage dynamics into account.
Because Munasinghe and Sicherman did consider wage dynamics, their results were more definitive: over the first decade of employment, the difference in wages increased dramatically — nonsmokers’ wages grew to be anywhere from 15 to 40 percent higher than those of smokers. The far-reaching NLSY data allowed the researchers to eliminate variables other than smoking — including sex, age, race, health, schooling, cognitive ability, religion and neighborhood income — that might correlate with the wage changes they observed.
Source: Science Daily
ARE YOU SURPRISED?
I’m not by the general findings, but that 15% – 40% increase in wages if you don’t smoke does surprise me somewhat.
I had no idea the gap was so big. Even 15% is a lot of money.
If you smoke and make $20,000 a year and your non-smoking colleague pulls in $23,000 – $28,000 in contrast.
Then when you figure in bonuses come as percentages of our salary (2%, 3%, 5%), the gap just continues to widen with each passing year.
I think a lot of it has to do with the following factors:
- We’ve become a NON-smoking society (unlike Mad Men times). No wonder vaping (with those portable vaporizers like Davincivaporizer.com) now is a big hit!
- We are all aware that smoking is bad so we may consider smokers to be irrational
- Smoking is generally not linked to being healthy and we like to follow fit leaders
- At work, smokers seem to take more breaks* every hour or so = 12.5% – 25% loss in productivity
- Heavy 5-pack-a-day smokers have a strong smell about them** which makes people avoid them
- Smokers seem more stressed and under pressure***
- It’s a more visible addiction, and it isn’t a good image****
*This may not be entirely true because I know a lot of non-smokers who take tons of coffee breaks or long lunches, but it sure seems like smokers go every once an hour, for 15 minutes. That’s a 25% loss in productivity for the company (15 minutes / 60 minutes or 1 hour).
But I also know smokers who are conscious of this and they PURPOSELY work like mad for 45 minutes to get those 15 minutes off.
**Sorry smokers. 🙁 It’s true. I’m highly sensitive to any kind of smoke and the smell knocks me back and makes me want to avoid working or being with heavy smokers.
***I know a lot of people who are stress smokers.
Some people eat when they’re stressed, others need a cigarette. They always seem so anxious to get their next nicotine puff, putting their coats on and rushing out the door.
****Addictions make people shy away.
It’s essentially an uncontrollable behaviour, and people don’t want to be with people who can’t control themselves. Although, if you tell someone you’re addicted to chocolate, working or even shopping, you won’t get as negative of a reaction as someone who says they’re addicted to cigarettes.
Just a girl trying to find a balance between being a Shopaholic and a Saver.
I cleared $60,000 in 18 months earning $65,000 gross/year.
Now I am self-employed, and you can read more about 
Very interesting. Although I’d love to see the results if a similar study were carried out in Germany, where the number of people who smoke is so high. I work in an entirely white collar company and so many of the senior management and partners smoke they managed, when the company moved to a new building a few years ago, to get the non-smoking status of the building revoked and it became a smoking is allowed in your own office as long as anyone coming into your office doesn’t object. And objecting happens about as often as you might expect (that is to say, how many junior staff do you think it would even occur to to reprimand a partner?)
Another aspect I would be interested in is the networking aspect of it. I remember in school there was a fairly small group of girls that smoked but even those who would not otherwise have been friends at all, were always fairly pally (explained to me as one friend as never knowing who you might have to borrow a smoke from one day). Similarly, in Ireland, when the workplace smoke ban was introduced, the outdoor area where the smokers were became the place to find out all the latest, whether in work or out socialising.
On an only slightly related note, I have one friend who gave up smoking five years ago. She has always diligently put the money aside every month that she was otherwise spending on cigarettes (she set up a special bank account and just transfers the money at the start of the month). Every year, on the anniversary of her giving up, she uses that money to buy herself something fabulous. Recently I got to admire her very lovely new Rolex watch (and her mum, who never knew she smoked, thinks she’s just good at finding good fakes). 🙂
I have another take on the situation entirely. And that smoking is closely correlated to a certain class of work.
In the white collar world I’ve experienced, few people smoke. The ones that do tend not to be heavy smokers (ie I worked with one guy for a year before I found out that he smoked cigarettes – he never went out on breaks or anything).
In the blue collar world, smoking is prevalent. I don’t want to start talking about class or money or anything like that, just my observation that in these professions, the majority of people smoke, and very frequently – you can’t spend more than half an hour or so with them without quickly realising that they’re smokers, because they’re always rolling a ciggy or ducking outside.
This is based on my experience working in the white collar world, and observation of the blue collar colleagues and friends of T’s, as well as simple observation of the dynamics at my own company. We have multiple companies under the parent umbrella, including some traditionally more blue collar ones – printing, courier, logistics – and you’ll hardly see any from the top floor out in the smoker’s courtyard because it’s full of guys from the ground shop floor.
That of course ties into the fact that white collar work on the whole tends to be more lucrative, even though skilled tradespeople can bank good money.
Interesting.. but I agree with Jane that it’s largely attributed to the amount of breaks they take. Even if it’s allowed, it doesn’t reflect well on you if you’re always leaving for 10-15 minutes to have a cigarette
I definitely feel it’s the breaks situation. I always get annoyed that they have to take breaks when you’re working through that. You have to consider they have to take a smoking break PLUS the coffee/tea break that everyone else takes.