Comments on: Court: Worker rightly fired, but company has to pay for his lawyer

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 19:29:13 +0000

Layla, you may want to revisit using a hair follicle test as a confirmation for a positive resulting from a urine analysis. Dependent on the drug, frequency of use and the donor’s ability to metabolize the drugs, a urine analysis is only going to identify short term drug use (days to weeks )and a hair follicle test typically is used to identify longer term drug use (weeks to months). Due to this difference between the tests, a hair follicle test is not recommended to be used as a confirmation for a positive urine analysis. If you are using a SAMSHA certified laboratory for the urine analysis it would be unlikely that you encountered a false positive but rather the hair follicle test couldn’t confirm the urine analysis because of the different time periods for it can test for.

By: Jodi

Jodi — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:30:14 +0000

I live and work in Iowa. Iowa state law is very specific on drug testing and the parameters that you have to follow. By not notifying the employee in a timely basis, they opened themselves up to that liability. The law requires that you notify them by certified mail of their positive results and the option to have the second specimen sent to a lab of their choice at their expense. The employee then has 7 days from the date of the letter to notify the company if they want to re-test. Every employer I’ve worked at has some type of drug testing program, but very few actually do random.

By: Layla

Layla — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 15:50:36 +0000

We do have such a policy- the first test is a urine test- if that tests comes back positive then there is an immediate hair follicle test administered- we have found a few false positives this way- generally the second test confirms the first and the employee is dismissed.