Work Daze

OK, fatty. Put down that jelly donut and step away from the conference table. I don’t care if you are a big boss or a total loss, if I see powdered sugar on your chin, I’m going to do something drastic, like call the HR department and report you for making unwanted advances on a box of Entenmann's.

Tough love? Perhaps, but it’s only fair to warn you. You may think no one has noticed the extra inches you’ve added to your waistline since the New Year. You may believe that no notices the junk in your trunk, but you’re wrong.

Management has noticed, and they’re out do something about it. Unfortunately, it’s the kind of thing that management does best – fire people for trivial reasons. In this case, the reason is fat.

“Waistlines Expand Into a Workplace Issue” is the headline on Kelley Holland’s “Under New Management” column in the June 22 issue of “The New York Times.” And while being caught in the computer closet with a bag full of chocolate croissants is not yet a firing issue, those of us who have played the workplace game of hide and seek with downsizers and cost cutters can smell a “fireable offense” a mile away.

It could be that your managers are overwrought at overweight employees because the company knows that it is healthier to be Paris Hilton thin than Bubba the Love Sponge fat. It could be, but it ain’t. It’s money that drives your managers to drive you in anorexia. “Obesity costs companies $45 billion a year,” according to reporter Holland who cites research by the Conference Board and RTI International, a research institution. [These statistics would probably be different if the research had been conducted by the Sara Lee Institute, but what can you do?]

The cause of these costs is not, as you’d expect, the price companies pay for adding steel reinforcements to the seats of Aeron chairs, or widening cubical doorways to insure egress to the rotund. Turns out fat people may be fun to be around, but they are expensive to have on your health plan.

“Obesity is a more powerful trigger for chronic health problems than either smoking or heavy drinking,” economists at the RAND Corporation have determined. Their research also reveals that fatties miss work more frequently and “tend to be loss mobile on the job than their thinner counterparts.”

This last barb could be explained by the really obvious fact that fat people are more likely to be stuck in their desk chairs. They’d like to jump up and run across the office to help a supervisor in distress, but they’re so wedged in that they can’t reach escape velocity. Fatter people could also be smarter. They know that volunteering in an office environment brings many more risks than rewards. Plus, they may not want to leave the three hundred bags of M&Ms they have stashed in their bottom desk drawer.

Sadly, what is riling up the big thinkers in corporate America is not the prejudice that is being unleashed on those of us in the chubby minority, but the fact that managers are not speaking up loudly to promote the cult of thinness.

The experts want our managers to operate like the Japanese, where a recent Federal law mandates that companies measure the circumference of their employers to insure that they are within national guidelines. “Those exceeding government limits -- 33.5 inches for men and 35.4 inches for women -- will be given dieting guidance if after three months they do not lose weight,” reports “The Huffington Post.”

Here, in America, some companies are taking a less Orwellian approach and actually offering cash incentives to employees who start slimming. Giving discounts and rebates on gym memberships are other ways enlightened companies try to lighten up the staff. Some even build gyms inside the workplace, taking over office real estate that once housed corporate vice presidents, and replacing the dumb bells with bar bells.

Best of all, a few company officials are finally beginning to understand that being overweight does not represent moral weakness, but is, instead, a disease. And about time. After all, we’ve accepted the pathology of the loonies who manage us, with their toxic demands to come to work early and stay late, not to mention their life-threatening desire to participate in meaningless “mission statements.”

They’ve taken away our dignity. The least they could do is leave us our donuts.