8 Sometimes You Just Needed a Break. (And Even Those Could Be Fraught.)
THE SMOKE BREAK The Perks of a Bad Habit
One morning in 1989, the employees of Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette arrived to discover that their ashtrays, overnight, had become decorative. A banner had been tacked to one wall: the nonsmokers have won. Until that point, “it was much more going outside to take a break from smoking than taking a break to smoke,” recalls Mark Manson, then an equity research analyst with the firm. But as the decade ended, this was starting to invert at offices across New York. To breathe fresh air, you would simply stay inside, and to smoke, you would have to go out. Down on the street, looking for a nook, you would face enemies: joggers, windchill. It was “a tragic day, an infamous day,” Manson says. It was the future. By 1994, the year the City Council introduced the first of the Smoke-Free Air Acts, the smoke breaks outside Manhattan office buildings had become, if not a tourist attraction, a thing tourists noticed. Dr. Alan Blum, a longtime anti-tobacco activist, likes to tell the story of a Japanese real-estate magnate who, on a drive through lower Manhattan, smiled at all the young women out smoking: “So many prostitutes in New York City.”
The Times called it an “exile.” Two, three, four times per day (the most breaks a 1997 study of New York sidewalks by Philip Morris recorded anyone taking is nine), the worker-smoker, putting on her sunglasses or puffy coat, would nip outdoors, select a spot (“Adult smokers are loyal to their typical smoking spot,” the study reported), and let ten or so minutes float by while inhaling an aerosolized mixture of 6.1 parts per million formaldehyde. The smoker was free to go because she was unwelcome to stay, a perk that, to some, seemed like a punishment, and a policy whose particulars varied (until the 2003 ban) by workplace, shop, and the boss’s whim. No rite of office life has pissed off more people. “It was the fate of worker privilege writ large,” says the historian Gregory Wood, the author of a book on the subject, who also called the smoke break, in an age of weakening unions, a “microcosm of declining worker power.” This microcosm went well with coffee.
The Times quoted a smoke-breaker named Alan Yeck: “The isolation wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the condemnation.” Recent tobacco scholarship more or less agrees about why workplace smoking ended. Not health concerns, not carcinogens: overhead. “The bottom line was that nonsmoking policies were good for the bottom line,” writes Sarah Milov in 2019’s The Cigarette.
In 1981, an academic named William Weis had determined that each smoking worker cost his employer $4,611 more annually than his nonsmoking counterpart. In fact, Weis’s math was off— financially speaking, smokers do us all a favor by dying young— but among America’s managers, the number had struck a chord. There was something almost touching about the attempts of the Tobacco Institute (a now-defunct trade group once described by the Times as “merchants of death”) to argue that the smoke break was cost neutral. “Nonsmokers can waste time daydreaming while sitting at their workstation,” reads a 1991 white paper. “And a smoker may be composing a letter while taking a smoking break.”
Cigarettes themselves changed. There was the Marlboro Express, made stubbier for shorter breaks, and the Merit, made spindlier for longer ones. A study published in the journal Addiction found that smoke-breakers inhaled “nearly 19% ‘harder.’” Of course they did—they were late. They had to get back. They were secondclass citizens enjoying a first-class luxury, a tar-laced ticket to leave work whenever they liked, and these contradictions brought them closer together. “It’s possible, even likely, that some good friendships were formed as a consequence of the Great Exiling,” says Christopher Buckley, the author of 1994’s satirical Thank You for Smoking. “I’d say ‘long-lasting’ friendships, but that’s a tricky qualifier in the case of smoking.”