Weight of expectation: Is it the duty of employers to ensure their staff’s fitness?

It is not such a ridiculous idea, having companies encourage their staff to lose weight and generally become healthier; even the most militant libertarian might find it difficult to challenge that mild proposition. Drinking too much, eating too much, smoking (at all) and exercising too little evidently costs individuals, their families and the NHS dear.

What is more bizarre is the advice from the new Chief Executive of the NHS, Simon Stevens, that staff be given specific incentives for losing weight – shopping vouchers or cash, for example, paid for by their bosses. Such a strategy could easily be construed as discriminatory by those who tend towards the chunky. Nor is there that much in it for bosses; there is no relationship, outside of a few jobs requiring sheer athletic ability, between body mass index and productivity. Overweight people are lazily assumed to be lazy; there is no evidence for this. They can certainly be smarter and more collegiate than their more lissom colleagues. What is more, the “big boned” may not be in any position to do anything about their weight, which may have little to do with their appetites and more to do with medical problems.

But if the case for employer intervention is accepted, what might make more financial sense is for those who fail to lose weight finding their salaries reduced pound-for-pound, so to speak, in order to pay for the bonuses being given to the slimmers: the stick as well as the health-food store carrot, in other words. In any case, this latest suggestion gives new meaning to the old idea that an employer will always seek their pound of flesh.