…（゜Д゜;）英字新聞

Businesses may be obliged to ban smoking

The health ministry is expected to oblige business enterprises to enforce a total ban on smoking in workplaces, it was learned Wednesday.
A Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry committee, which discusses how to prevent health hazards caused by secondhand smoke, drew up a draft report that incorporated the total ban.
The Labor Policy Council, an advisory panel to Health, Labor and Welfare Minister Akira Nagatsuma, will work out details of the smoking ban and submit a bill to revise the Industrial Safety and Health Law to the ordinary Diet session, probably next year.
In February, the ministry issued an instruction under the name of the Health Service Bureau chief, encouraging prefectural governments to ban smoking in public places such as schools and restaurants in line with the Health Promotion Law. The instruction was nonbinding.
The draft report goes a step further by proposing that businesses ban smoking in workplaces and obliges them to set aside enclosed rooms for smoking.
It also proposes to set emission and other standards to ensure smoke does not escape from smoking rooms. Labor standards inspection offices would instruct and supervise the businesses, it said.
The report also touches on service industries, such as restaurants and inns, which cannot force customers to stop smoking.
To prevent people from being exposed to passive smoking, the report wants business operators to study such measures as separate smoking areas, the use of masks and proper ventilation.
As industry associations of restaurants and inns fiercely opposed the instruction issued in February, what kind of measures should be taken will become a focal point, observers said.
According to a survey conducted by the ministry in 2007, 54 percent of business enterprises do not take any measures to ban smoking or provide separate smoking areas.
Small and medium-sized companies, in particular, have been slow in taking up such issues, the survey said.