RTD Plans Random Drug Tests of Workers

Southern California Rapid Transit District officials said Tuesday they will begin administering random drug tests to 7,000 drivers and mechanics in December in order to comply with new federal regulations that require the tests for about 4 million transportation employees who have safety or security-related responsibilities.

The head of the union that represents the district’s bus drivers said the union opposes “the concept of random testing” but acknowledged that political support for tests is probably too strong to fight.

The federal regulations, announced late last year by the Department of Transportation, cover employees in aviation, trucking and railroads along with seamen and pipeline workers. Most large companies must begin random tests by Dec. 21. Smaller companies will have longer to begin.

Required by U.S.

The RTD--which already administers drug tests to workers before they are hired, after accidents and in cases of questionable behavior--is required to add random tests to maintain eligibility for funding from the Department of Transportation’s Urban Mass Transportation Administration, which provides half of the funding for the RTD’s Metro Rail project.

RTD General Manager Alan F. Pegg said the RTD will begin by requiring 25% of its drivers and maintenance workers to take drug tests. After a year, tests will be administered to half the work force, as required by the government regulations.

The tests will affect about 7,000 of the RTD’s 8,600 employees. Questions of how often the tests will be administered and how employees will be selected have yet to be determined.

RTD spokesman Anthony Greno stressed that the tests will be “blind samples,” meaning that information about positive tests on individual workers will not be forwarded to their supervisors, placed in their file or used against the employee in any way. The information will simply be collected and filed periodically for record-keeping purposes with the Urban Mass Transportation Administration, he said.

About one-fifth of all private-sector employees now work for a company that conducts drug testing of some sort, according to a 1988 Labor Department study. But the Transportation Department’s drug-testing requirement is regarded as the most wide-ranging program against drugs in the workplace ever launched by a federal agency.

Court Rulings

The Supreme Court has upheld the right of employers to demand drug tests for employment applicants, for personnel involved in accidents and for those who take periodic physicals as a condition of employment. But attorneys who represent labor unions believe that the court has yet to rule on whether purely random tests such as those to be implemented by the RTD are constitutional or whether they violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches.

“What is more onerous about random testing is that the employee proceeds through not only his work life but his private life on a daily basis wondering when and in what circumstance his privacy will be invaded,” said Glen Rothner, a Los Angeles labor lawyer.

Earl Clark, general chairman of the United Transportation Union, which represents the district’s bus drivers, said he was upset by the district’s announcement because the union and district officials have yet to confer on the specifics of the testing program. The first meeting will be held today, Clark said.

He said he opposes random testing because it gives management “certain ways of implementing random tests that can be very unfair to certain employees.” He said he would prefer a system in which all employees, including himself and Pegg, are tested. He also said the union would like to see each specimen “split” so that samples could be sent to two labs to reduce the margin for error.

If the RTD does not devise a system that meets such concerns, the union will go to court to challenge the procedure, Clark said.