Durban - Employees who smoke earn 17.5 percent less than their colleagues who don’t light up, according to a new US study.
And in South Africa, households that buy tobacco typically spend less on education and food and more on alcohol.
On average, US smokers earned $27 248 (R266 000) annually, while non-smokers made about $33 820 (R330 000), said Melinda Pitts, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and co-author of the report.
Pitts and economist Julie Hotchkiss studied the relationship between smoking and wages using data from employees in the US collected between 1992 and 2011.
They found people who had quit smoking for at least a year not only saved money on cigarettes, but earned higher wages than smokers and those who had never smoked. People who had never smoked earned about 5 percent less than the hourly wages of former smokers, while smokers earned just 80 percent of the non-smokers’ wages.
“It takes a special person to quit an addictive behaviour, and there is a higher reward for smoking cessation than not ever starting it,” said Pitts.
“I think the qualities of persistence, patience and everything else that goes along with being able to quit are valuable to employers,” Pitts wrote in the study.
Although similar research has not been conducted in South Africa, research here has identified some stark differences between spending behaviour in smoking versus non-smoking households.
“Unpublished research done at the University of Cape Town (UCT) has found households which buy tobacco typically spend less money on education and food, and often spend more on alcohol, relative to households which do not buy tobacco,” said UCT’s Professor Corné van Walbeeck.
“This implies smokers tend to place a higher value on current ‘pleasure’… while non-smokers place a higher value on the future…There could also be a poverty cycle associated with smoking,” Van Walbeeck said.
“Smoking households spend less money on their children’s education, reducing the children’s lifetime earnings. People with less education are more likely to smoke, thus the combination of less education, lower earnings and higher smoking prevalence continues into future generations.”
– Health-e News Service