Are you fit enough to keep your job? The question may begin to vex us all as employers crack down on our lazy habits to make us more productive and less sickly.

The US, typically, offers a vision of the future. At Lincoln Industries, a New England metal company, its chief executive, Marc LeBaron, demands that his workers stay fit. He has launched a wellness plan that forbids smoking, requires quarterly checkups for body fat and offers health seminars. He has achieved 100 per cent participation. In exchange for hitting the gym, quitting the fags and doing yoga, employees get discounted health insurance and cash rewards of £120 a year.

Programmes that promote healthy lifestyles with financial carrots and sticks are increasingly popular in the US, where 46 per cent of employers offer them, says a study by the National Business Group on Health. That’s up from 30 per cent in 2006.

Could it happen here? It may, if companies latch on to new evidence from Cincinnati University that workplace wellness schemes help employees to live healthier lives. The analysis in the Journal of Health Promotion says that “education and counselling” do have an impact on reducing workers’ weight.

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Already British insurers are moving from providing bog-standard personal medical insurance policies designed for employees once they are ill, to products that aim to prevent illness. “All insurers are jumping on the wellbeing bandwagon,” says Steve Walker, the managing director of Medical Insurance Services.

But a legal case may block this trend. A test case against Scotts Miracle-Gro is being heard in Massachusetts, where Scott Rodrigues is suing the company for millions of dollars, claiming that it unfairly fired him for smoking. Scotts won’t comment, but Rodrigues’s lawyer says: “This is precedent-setting. If it’s permissible to do what they did, it’s a slippery slope.”

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