Drug-Free Need Is Real

I confess. When then-newly installed Intl. Assn. of Exhibitions and Events President Randy Bauler announced at a press conference during Expo! Expo! IAEE's Annual Meeting & Exhibition last December that one of his most important goals was a drug-free workplace, I thought to myself, “Tell me something I don't already know.”

Who, I wondered, would't want a drug-free workplace? Who works for a company in what industry that doesn't already have strict policies about the use of drugs and alcohol?

Then he pointed out that before the Washington (D.C.) Convention Center began what has become a model program for deterring drug use, 48 percent of workers there tested positive for drug or alcohol use in early 2005. By the end of the year, that figure was down to 13 percent and, according to an article elsewhere in this issue of Tradeshow Week, it is now somewhere closer to 3 to 5 percent.

At what may be an historic meeting of labor unions and service contractors last week in Las Vegas, a GES Exposition Services official pointed out that it conducts about 1,500 drug and alcohol tests each year for both union and non-union employees. The company found that about 5 percent tested positive, and 7.5 percent when the test was conducted because of an accident or some other suspicious incident.

While these statistics are an improvement over the status quo in previous “bad old days,” Joe Sangregorio, GES vice president of human resources and labor relations, noted that they are still above the national average across all industries.

I continue to be surprised and disappointed by these numbers. Even if the tradeshow industry is getting closer to being a drug-free workplace, when on the average day one out of every 20 people working to move in or move out a tradeshow is testing positive for drugs, Bauler is right: The industry must do better.

While we have begun to see cracks in the veneer that are accompanying an overall economic downturn in the world, the tradeshow industry remains relatively healthy. Despite the startling increase in the number of ways companies have to market themselves that has accompanied the evolution in technology, we have learned that there is still a place for face-to-face marketing – but that place is ever so fragile.

Just as a bad experience in an airport security line or hotel room can be enough to make a potential attendee swear off tradeshows, so can an unpleasant, and perhaps dangerous, incident during an exhibitor's move-in compel him or her to skip the tradeshow next time and pour those limited marketing dollars into an Internet campaign instead.

I, for one, am not as ho-hum as I was even a few months ago about an initiative to strive for a drug-free workplace.

Michael Hart is editor-in-chief of Tradeshow Week. He can be reached at hartm@reedbusiness.com.