Can you drink at work?

[MayorDusty]

I was listening to something about parliament and the free booze and it got me thinking.
I'd be sacked and I don't work with machinery or driving. Most people I know wouldn't be allowed apart from one who works in a pub and then it's a two drink maximum.
What jobs/industries still allow alcohol consumption?
Can you drink and what's the job?

Only if I want to get sacked!

I work in IT consultancy and we have a lot of team / client lunches and dinners that involve alcohol. However, I also have quite a few Muslim colleagues, so it's not considered the be all and end all, and non-drinkers are fairly common.

We also have a fridge in our office stocked with wine and beer, and it's perfectly acceptable to grab one on a Friday afternoon, then go back to your desk and carry on working.

I think coming in in the morning and splashing whisky on your cornflakes / keeping a bottle of vodka in your desk drawer would probably be frowned upon, though.

20 years or so ago my workplace had an on site bar and we were actively encouraged to use it (subsidised booze).

Seems odd now really. We'll go for drinks after work but not during working hours.

The whole culture around alcohol has changed I think - I remember meeting for lunch with my ante natal group, obv with all our babies, round each other's houses. The wine would be open. That rarely happens now, according to younger friends/colleagues I know.

Work in a creative industry - we have drinks in the office and its not unheard of for people to come back from a long boozy business lunch absolutely hammered. So we dont have anything in our contracts about drinking at work.

I think it would be different if a person was doing it on a regular occurrence or it was impacting their work.

It grates on me. There are plenty of professions where team bonding, more informal conversations, decompressing, feeling valued (eg noting a life event like retiring/moving on etc) are really important to the employees and often improve outcomes however there is absolutely no alcohol and no downtime during working hours.
All those things are very important in my line of work but it would be gross misconduct, probably splashed all over the tabloids and a fair chunk of the population would probably be pretty angry.
Although finance etc aren't public sector they still have a lot of influence on people's lives (financial crash anyone?) so if public servants like social workers and teachers aren't having long Friday lunches because 'they have such an important job' and it wouldn't be considered ok 'as long as they got the job done' I don't see why many others are.

The HoP bars don't fill up till towards the end of the working day though. They're not getting pissed then going to PMQs!

I worked in publishing and all the different mags had their favourite pubs. My boss used to keep a bottle of whiskey in his drawer. Liquid lunches were normal. Not now though (bet he still has a bottle in his desk though).

I’m a paramedic. So, no. We’re also supposed to keep 12 hours clear of drinking before a shift, but that’s not enforced in any real way.

Well, I’m still working from home so not sure anyone would notice

Varies according to area on where you can drink in the city. Many banks now have draconian rules which limit alcohol consumption even in the evening. Insurance broking still tends to be prone to heavy drinking.

I used to work in publishing/ advertising about 15 -20 years ago and it was very much a thing and often encouraged.
It was perfectly acceptable to go out for a boozy lunch with a client and not make it back to the office. We had a pub on site and often had lunchtime drinks.

Think it’s a calmed down a bit now but I do worry the impact those years had on my liver. I had to leave when I was pregnant as couldn’t cope with the boozy culture. Good fun while it lasted though.

@TheUnexpectedPickle your profession is one of those we all appreciate your abstinence!
We were WFH for a long time before the pandemic and even then a rough night before would be frowned upon. Public sector that was previously CS but there wasn't ever a drinking culture in our department. It'd be considered compromising to the role.

All of my workplaces there would have been occasional drinks in the office for special events. One of them did Friday after work drinks if we’d won a particularly big job. It was all at the end of the day though. So while you might need to go and finish off a bit of work the assumption generally was we were going home.

Lunchtime drinks at a team lunch, possibly. We’d basically watch the manager and if they ordered a wine we could too. But it didn’t happen very often.

We absolutely do (law firm). We have a well stocked drinks cupboard and there’s always beer in the fridge (as well as soft drinks).

A lot of my monthly expenses are concerning pubs and bars.

At my previous firm, we’d regularly have a wine on a Friday lunch out.😁

H and I were discussing the other night that this is a culture shift. When we and our friends started our careers 20-25 years ago, a lunchtime pint was acceptable in most professionals, including community NHS teams, civil service, local govt, schools and police. Not a daily thing, but the occasional team lunch, with management present reinforcing that this was ok. And then all back to work afterwards.

Nowadays I think anyone in the above professions would get disciplined for the same.

I used to be a management consultant. The office had a big kitchen/break out area with table tennis etc, and huge fridges full of beer and wine. The were locked most of the time but at 5pm on a Friday they'd be opened. Plenty of people still hadn't finished their work by 5pm and it was totally acceptable to grab a beer and take it to your desk while you finished a report.

Not in my business, they take a bit of a dim view.

I'm not taken with the concept - an age thing or just I'm not good at drinking during the day - not sure how you can do an afternoon's work afterwards really.

Christmas is different obvs.

My place of work opens bottles of beer and wine (and snacks) on a Friday around 3pm.

I think there was a big shift about 20 years ago, when I first started work Friday lunchtimes in the pub with copious amounts of alcohol were totally the norm, that would be completely unthinkable now unless it was a leaving do, Christmas meal or similar, which would be scheduled around so no one had huge amounts of work left to do afterwards. No one would have more than a couple to drink either. I have never worked anywhere where drinking on the premises happened, in some jobs it was specifically prohibited from the site, so if you did a bit of shopping at lunchtime and had a bottle of wine in your bag that would be trouble too if security caught you.

I never did daytime drinking with mum friends when the DCs were tiny either, which was 18 years ago now, we have always been strictly tea or coffee.

I think it depends on location to, I have always worked in places where virtually everyone drives to work, I can imagine it’s different in cities where the majority use public transport.

When I was a lawyer, yes, absolutely. Even occasionally had a drinks trolly on a Friday late afternoon.

Now in the public sector, so no drink at all at lunchtime, or anywhere on the premises even after work e.g. a quiz.

And when we have a Xmas lunch if you want to drink you need to take the afternoon off. We started doing them as late lunches instead which is much better as you don't need so many hours off.

I have a friend who works in tech, one place he worked just had a fridge stocked with various drinks including beer, cider, wine etc and anyone could help themselves whenever they wanted.

Not usually but I was at a conference last month which was basically somewhere close to 20-hour boozing sessions...