United’s vaccine success happened bit by bit
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby reached a breaking point while vacationing in Croatia this summer: After receiving word that a 57year-old United pilot had died after contracting the coronavirus, he felt it was time to require all employees to get vaccinated.
He paced for about a half-hour and then called two of his top executives. “We concluded enough is enough,” Kirby said in an interview Thursday. “People are dying, and we can do something to stop that with United Airlines.”
The company announced its vaccine mandate days later, kicking off a two-month process that ended last Monday. Kirby’s team had guessed that no more than 70 percent of the airline’s workers were already vaccinated, and the requirement helped persuade most of the rest. Nearly all of United’s 67,000 U.S. employees have been vaccinated, in one of the largest and most successful corporate efforts of its kind during the pandemic.
The key to United’s success, even in states where vaccination rates are at or below the national average, such as Texas and Florida, was a gradual effort that started with providing incentives and getting buy-in from employee groups, especially unions, which represent a majority of its workers.
About 2,000 employees have applied for medical or religious exemptions, although their fate is unclear as United fights a lawsuit over its plan to place them on temporary leave. A few hundred more failed to comply with the mandate and could be fired in coming weeks.
When United announced its mandate in early August, it was part of a lonely group of large employers willing to broadly require vaccination. Some companies, such as Disney and Walmart, had acted earlier but initially required only some employees to be vaccinated, primarily white-collar staff.
The airline earned praise from President Joe Biden, who weeks later announced that regulators would require all businesses with 100 or more workers to require vaccinations or conduct weekly virus testing. But the company drew scorn from conservatives.
United had been laying the groundwork for a vaccine mandate for at least a year. The airline already had experience requiring vaccines. It has mandated a yellow fever vaccination for flight crews based at Dulles International Airport, near Washington, because of a route to Ghana, whose government requires it.
In January, at a virtual meeting, Kirby told employees that he favored a coronavirus vaccine mandate.
Writing letters to families of the employees who had died of the virus was “the worst thing that I believe I will ever do in my career,” he said at the time, according to a transcript. But while requiring vaccination was “the right thing to do,” United would not be able to act alone, he said.
The union representing flight attendants pushed the company to focus first on access and incentives. It argued that many flight attendants could not get vaccinated because they were not yet eligible in certain states.
Kirby acknowledged that widespread access would be a precondition. The airline and unions worked together to set up clinics for staff in cities where it has hubs, such as Houston, Chicago and Newark, N.J.
In May, United’s pilots reached an agreement that would give them extra pay for getting vaccinated, and flight attendants worked toward an agreement that would give them extra vacation days. Both incentives declined in value over time and typically expired by early July.
Then, shortly after Kirby’s decision a few weeks later, the airline began informing the two unions that it would impose the mandate in early August. Employees would have to be vaccinated by Oct. 25 or within five weeks of a vaccine’s formal approval by the Food and Drug Administration, whichever came first.
The success of the incentives — about 80 percent of United’s flight attendants were also vaccinated by the time the airline announced its mandate in August — inspired the company to expand them to all employees, offering a full day’s pay to anyone who provided proof of vaccination by Sept. 20.
The company had not surveyed its workers but estimated that 60 percent to 70 percent were already vaccinated. Getting the rest there would not be easy.
Margaret Applegate, 57, a 29year United employee who works as a service representative in the United Club at San Francisco International Airport, helps illustrate why.
Applegate normally does not hesitate to get vaccines, noting that her late father was a doctor and that her daughter does research in nutritional science.
Her daughter urged her to get vaccinated, but she remained deeply ambivalent. Friends and
co-workers “were feeding me stories about horrible things happening to people with the vaccine,” she said. She worried about the relatively new technology behind the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines and whether her heart condition could pose complications, although her cardiologist assured her it would not.
As Applegate agonized, she reached out to Lori Augustine, the vice president who oversees United’s San Francisco hub. Augustine assured Applegate that she was a valued employee the company wanted to keep and offered to accompany her to get her shot. As they walked to the clinic early last month, Applegate said, she felt empowered but anxious.
Since she got her shot, her conversations with people firmly opposed to vaccinations have diminished. “The ones talking about pros and cons more seriously, without just saying everything is a con, those I was able to continue having a conversation with,” she said.
The airline, too, prepared for blowback in places such as its Houston hub and Florida, where it operates many flights.
“We thought about the possibility that we could face situations in some states where laws might be passed to counter a decision that we might make and what the implications of that might be,” said Brett Hart, the airline’s president. “That legal risk did not trump the possibility of keeping some of our team members, who otherwise wouldn’t be here, alive.” The airline said dozens of its employees had died after coming down with COVID-19.
United executives said they were surprised that positive feedback from politicians, customers and the public far outweighed the criticism the company received.
United’s vaccination rate has continued to improve. There was another rush before the deadline to receive the pay incentive and one more before the final Sept. 27 deadline. Toward the end of September, the company said 593 people had failed to comply. By Friday, the number had dropped below 240.
“I did not appreciate the intensity of support for a vaccine mandate that existed, because you hear that loud anti-vax voice a lot more than you hear the people that want it,” Kirby said. “But there are more of them. And they’re just as intense.”