State court upholds firing worker over smoking breaks

ALBANY - A paralegal who defied a new policy at work that banned smoking breaks for hourly employees was fired legally, a New York appeals court ruled Thursday.

Karen Kridel had worked for a Rochester law firm for about 14 months. Every day, she took a five-minute smoke break in the morning and another in the afternoon. She said she often worked an extra few minutes anyway, unpaid, and took any calls during her lunch break in the cafeteria.

But breaks outside of lunch were then prohibited in an October 2006 e-mail. She kept taking her smoke breaks and was fired the following month.