There are many examples of major public and private sector organisations which have introduced a policy on smoking in the workplace. The Commonwealth Department of Health became smokefree on 1 December 1986 and all Commonwealth public service departments became smokefree by March 1988. Telecom, Australia Post, Shell, ICI, CSIRO, BHP,(61) AMP, Westpac, 3M, Price Waterhouse and IBM(23) are a few of the many organisations which have adopted policies, along with most hospitals and state health departments. Western Australian TAB betting offices became smokefree in April 1991,(62) soon followed by South Australian,(63) Victorian(64) and ACT(65) TAB agencies. The Australian Army has also restricted smoking in all offices, halls and mess facilities.(66)
Surveys in Victoria and New South Wales show that the majority of top private companies in these states have introduced either partial or complete smokefree policies. In Victoria in 1991, 85% of companies surveyed had some form of smoking restriction, 33% banning smoking totally and 52% having partial bans in place. By 1993, 98% of companies surveyed had restrictions in place, 74% banning smoking completely, and 24% enforcing partial restrictions,(66) and by April 1994, all of the surveyed companies in Victoria had at least some kind of smoking restrictions, with 81% banning smoking completely.(67) In New South Wales in 1991, 73% of the 232 companies surveyed had introduced smokefree workplaces, an increase of almost 20% from survey results in the previous year.(68) The proportion of companies with total (rather than partial) bans had also increased. A survey of small businesses in New South Wales in 1992 has shown that 75% have some degree of workplace smoking ban.(68) All of these surveys found that the majority of companies introduced bans without difficulty, and that there had been a rapid acceleration in the numbers of companies introducing policies in the most recent survey year.
Other research in South Australia,(71,72) Western Australia(73,74) New South Wales(75) and Victoria(76) has estimated the proportion of workers whose workplaces have some kind of ban in force. In South Australia in 1989, 28% of workers experienced total smoking bans at work. In 1991, this had climbed to 53%. In Western Australia, the proportion of workers with total smoking bans has increased from 17% in 1985, to over 70% in 1991. Thirty-three percent of workers in New South Wales were employed in workplaces with total bans in force in 1990. In Victoria, the percentage of indoor workers working in a totally smokefree environment increased from 17% in 1988 to 33% in 1990.
Workplace smoking bans are popular, a majority of Australians supporting their introduction (see Section 6.13 below). The next section describes how the policy affecting the largest working population of Australians grew further in popularity once introduced.