It's estimated that, in England and Wales, 18m working days a year are lost to obesity. Some studies also show that employees with a high body mass index (BMI) are less productive and more prone to absenteeism. Productivity and presenteeism aren't everything, of course, but Britain's employers are certainly put off by fat: a new poll of 2,000 personnel officers reveals that half of them believe overweight people lack self discipline, and that obesity affects productivity. A third think that obesity is a valid medical reason for not hiring someone.
In America, where they're ahead of us on every level of this debate, Wal-Mart is trying, it was reported yesterday, to incorporate physical exercise into every employee's job description, not to help the overweight get in shape, but to stop them applying for jobs in the first place - in their own words, "to dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart" - thereby saving them an estimated $1bn a year in benefits.
Wal-Mart has never set much of an example in employee relations but their policy has implications for UK companies. Refusing to hire a specific fat person would be discriminatory, but there are no anti-fattist laws in the UK. The obese person's best hope of legal protection is the Disability Discrimination Act, though they would have to be fat enough to be considered disabled, or their fatness would have to be the cause of another disability - arthritis, perhaps - for them to make a case.
In the US, organisations such as the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (Naafa) have long championed the rights of the overweight. There, the debate has moved on to whether operations like stomach stapling should be covered by an employer's health plan (Wal-Mart - you guessed it - says no). This in turn has prompted a larger question: whether it's a surfeit of fatness or a simple dearth of fitness that is responsible for the sharp rise in employee ill-health. Is fatness an illness in itself, or just an impossible-to-conceal manifestation of health problems that bedevil the population as a whole? And, when everyone in America is overweight, who will do the discriminating?
