Unvaccinated workers could face higher health insurance premiums or even risk employment termination in light of President Joe Biden’s order last week that employers with 100 or more workers require them to either get vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing.
The Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration will follow up with an emergency temporary standard to implement this requirement. The requirement is expected to affect approximately 80 million workers.
Labor unions are unlikely to step in to challenge the mandate.
“On the whole, there seems to be a general understanding that the employer’s legal footing for mandating vaccines is strong, and unions have acknowledged that,” Laura Boudreau, Ph.D., a professor of economics at Columbia Business School, told USA Today.
Unions, however, likely will “be very active around implementation of the policies themselves,” such as establishing a reasonable timeline for getting the shots, she said.
The vaccination / testing requirement has some employees concerned about losing their jobs if they refuse. In Pennsylvania, state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) has promised legislation to try to ensure that the financial effects are lessened if that happens. Mastriano is drafting a bill guarantee that employees who are fired or forced to resign over the requirement are not disqualified from unemployment benefits. The bill is expected to be introduced into the state legislature within the next couple of weeks.
“I believe that anyone who makes the personal choice to not comply with a vaccine mandate should have access to benefits to help pay their bills as they search for new employment,” Mastriano told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Overall, most older Americans support a requirement for healthcare workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19, according to the results of a recent poll conducted as part of the National Poll on Healthy Aging, based at the University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. Sixty-one percent of the respondents, aged 50 to 80 years, said that the vaccine definitely should be required for all healthcare workers, 19% said it probably should be required, and 20% said the vaccine should not be required.
