No jab, no job: David Walsh mandates Covid vaccination for all Mona staff
Tasmania’s flagship gallery, the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona), has become the first cultural institution in Australia to compel employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19.
In a memo issued to staff on Thursday, Mona’s idiosyncratic owner David Walsh utilised a dissident Soviet writer (“A society with unlimited rights is incapable of standing to adversity”– Alexander Solzhenitsyn) and a circular discourse on the importance of obeying traffic lights to explain why he was compelling his employees to get the jab if they wanted to keep their jobs.
“A few staff might think we are trampling on their rights, but the one right they think we are restricting doesn’t exist,” Walsh said, in the memo, which was published to Mona’s blog.
“Our staff don’t have the right to trample on the rights of their colleagues.”
“When you go to work unvaccinated there’s a small chance you’ll get Covid and an even smaller chance you’ll die. But each time you take that risk there is a small chance you’ll kill someone else … that’s not okay.”
Walsh’s post attracted plenty of comments on Thursday, both supportive and critical. It also sparked renewed argument on whether compulsory vaccination is illegal discrimination, or an infringement of people’s human rights.
On 28 June, Australia’s National Cabinet agreed to make vaccination against Covid-19 mandatory for residential aged care workers.
Last week prime minister Scott Morrison said he expected that immunisation against the virus would be “as mandatory as you can possibly make it” with exemptions only on medical grounds, before walking back on the comments just hours later.
“It’s not going to be compulsory to have the vaccine,” he said.
“We can’t hold someone down and make them take it.”
On 13 August, the Fair Work Ombudsman outlined a four-tier system to guide employers on the issue of mandatory Covid-19 vaccination.
When determining which tier organisations and businesses fall into, certain issues come into play: the nature of the workplace, to what extent employees have face-to-face contact with the public, the prevalence of the virus in the community where the business operates, and vaccine availability.
It is quite possible the staff at Mona fall into the tier three category – where employees are likely to have regular face-to-face interaction with members of the public or co-workers – according to a leading workplace lawyer Guardian Australia spoke to.
“Under work health and safety legislation, you’ve got a duty to eliminate risk and provide a safe working environment,” the lawyer said, who asked not to be named because the issue had become so politically contentious.
“Employers are looking into the future and accepting that Covid is going to be with us for a while,” she said.
“They are looking at this issue very seriously, both in relation to how they protect their people by requiring them to be vaccinated, and how they protect the people that come into their business.
“What we do know is that compulsory vaccination for particular sorts of conditions has been a long part of particular areas of employment … where it can be argued that it’s lawful and reasonable.”
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Holding views against vaccination or refusing to be vaccinated is not an attribute that is protected under antidiscrimination laws.
“It is going to be interesting to see where this all ends up,” the lawyer said, adding that there was a foreseeable scenario where vaccinated employees start refusing to attend work.
“Employers could face a situation where someone says, ‘I won’t come to work because Fred’s an anti-vaxxer, he goes to rallies on the weekend and doesn’t wear a mask, and I don’t want to work with him because I’ve got children under 12 or my mother in law’s got cancer, and I’m entitled to a safe workplace’.”
The decision by Mona comes two weeks after the Outback Festival Group announced a “no jab, no jive” policy for its 2022 Big Red Bash near Birdsville and its Mundi Mundi Bash near Broken Hill.
The rule will apply to all ticket holders, artists, crew, volunteers, and vendors.