Vaccination mandates are working
Studies show only a small number leaving jobs
The data is starting to roll in as vaccine mandate deadlines set by employers are approaching: vaccine mandates are working, leaving few employees behind.
“Losing any employees is tough … but it’s just not double-digit percentages who are leaving. It’s a small number in the end,” said Steve Koczela, president of MassINC Polling Group, who conducted an analysis of news articles on the subject first published in Commonwealth Magazine.
Koczela found in his analysis that the average company who published the number of employees who lost their jobs over refusing to comply with the vaccination mandate was less than 1% of the companies’ workforce, on average.
“When you’re looking at a big organization that can be hundreds of people, that’s what the headlines tend to focus on,” Koczela said of his motivation for the research, adding that he was seeking “context” to those hundreds leaving large companies.
The companies that lost the most employees percentage-wise also had the fewest employees to begin with, he found. For example, Canterbury Court, a nursing home in Atlanta, lost 10 of its 180 employees over the mandate, or 5.6% of its workforce.
Meanwhile, although 320 United Airlines employees lost their jobs over refusing the vaccine, that only represents 0.48% of their 67,000 employees.
In Massachusetts, the State Police union lost its court battle to delay the upcoming vaccine mandate deadline imposed by Gov. Charlie Baker, and a union spokesperson said that “dozens” of troopers had submitted their resignation letters over the mandate. However, the Boston Globe reported that only one trooper “definitively stated” that he was retiring specifically over the vaccine mandate.
The majority of the rest of the mandate deadlines that have passed so far are for health care organizations. Even in the cases of some of the largest number of resignations or terminations, like 175 at Novant Health in North Carolina, that only represents 0.5% of the organization’s 35,000 employees.
Koczela pointed out that 50% of unvaccinated workers surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in June said they’d leave their jobs over vaccine mandates, another by Washington Post/ABC found that figure to be 42%. Although not all vaccination deadlines have passed yet, he said, “if the reason that (employers are) not implementing (mandates) is fear of resignation, this would seem to allay some of those concerns.”
A spokesperson for Associated Industries of Massachusetts, which represents employers, said it was too early to determine whether Bay State workers are leaving their jobs over mandates.
“Most AIM members are still awaiting details from the US Department of Labor on President Biden’s requirement that companies with more than 100 employees establish a vaccine/testing mandate. Smaller companies, meanwhile, are still looking at their options. A clearer picture of employee response to any mandates will appear in a few months,” he said in an email.
Several large Massachusetts-based hospital systems’ vaccine mandate deadlines passed on October 1, including Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Baystate Health, Wellforce, which owns Lowell General Hospital and Tufts Medical Center, and Hebrew Senior Life.
The Boston Business Journal reported that 97% of Wellforce’s 12,000 employees met the Oct. 1 deadline, and 99% of Dana-Farber’s employees met theirs. MassLive reported that 145 unvaccinated Baystate Health employees were placed on unpaid leave on Oct. 1 for two weeks. If they don’t get their shots in that time, they’ll be laid off.