Once upon a time, there was a health benefit company in Michigan called Weyco.

One day, Weyco's senior management decided they didn't like smokers, so they required all of their smoking employees to quit smoking. If they didn't, they'd be fired. I went into the story, and my opinions on it here. If you recall, it's when I applied John Tant's Principle of Intolerable Mandates, and concluded that while the employees had a right to do whatever they wanted in their spare time, it was a more egregious infringement of the employer's right to hire whomever they want if this was overturned by a court.

Well, we have a new development. The fired employees appeared on the Today show yesterday, and are now protesting Weyco's actions based on privacy grounds. And offered up are all sorts of slippery slope arguments. But the basic facts don't change, and the story makes clear that Weyco's action was legal under Michigan law. As Michigan is an "at will" state, they could fire people for whatever reason. "Oh, you had LASIK? Clean out your desk."

So we're left with moral outrage. No, I wouldn't like a company telling me what I could or couldn't do in my spare time, but then I probably wouldn't work for a company that did such a thing anyway. So while I sympathize with the employees in question, and indeed think Weyco should have better things to worry about, I just can't find it in me to say Weyco doesn't have the right to their HR policies...ridiculous though they may be.