Employer refused to reassign worker after testing positive for cocaine
A third party hired by an employer to collect and test an employee’s biological samples for drugs does not owe the employee a common-law duty to perform services with reasonable care, the Texas Supreme Court recently said.
Turnaround Welding Services employed the respondent as a pipefitter, which had been his job for over 25 years. He was considered an at-will employee.
Turnaround assigned him to the Valero Ardmore Refinery and ordered him to provide the Houston Area Safety Council with hair and urine samples for drug and alcohol screenings, in line with Valero’s policy for on-site workers.
Read more: Can an employee be terminated for failure to submit to a drug test?
The Safety Council collected the respondent’s samples and delivered them to Psychemedics Corporation for laboratory testing. Psychemedics reported that his hair sample tested positive for cocaine and a cocaine metabolite.
The respondent denied ever using cocaine. Before this incident, he had never gotten a positive result in the drug tests he had taken in the course of his work as a pipefitter. He gave a second sample to DISA Global Solutions, another third-party collection entity.
DISA sent the sample to Psychemedics for testing. The respondent’s second and third samples had negative results for cocaine. DISA approved him for returning to work after he completed a substance-abuse course. However, Turnaround refused to reassign him to any...
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