New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Delay of Biden’s vaccine mandate helps retailers and shippers
The White House has extended a holiday gift of sorts to retail chains and package delivery companies — a postNew Year’s Day deadline to comply with mandatory employee vaccines and testing for COVID-19.
Many of those companies are struggling to fill open jobs amid advance Black Friday shopping, and an earlier deadline would have given them added headaches ahead of the December rush.
On Thursday, the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration set a Jan. 4 deadline for compliance with a mandate from President Joe Biden that millions of employees be vaccinated against COVID-19, or get tested weekly for the virus and wear as mask while indoors at work.
Biden announced the mandate in September with no implementation date. The White House executive order has drawn several court challenges since, with municipalities and large employers nationally reporting employees having quit — some in key roles — rather than get vaccinated.
In a press briefing, senior officials in the Biden administration did not say whether the holiday hiring season factored into the decision to set a January deadline, when retailers and freight carriers let go many of their seasonal workers.
The rule applies to employers with 100 or more workers and to federal contractors, with exemptions allowed under civil rights laws for workers on medical or religious grounds. The vaccine mandate is universal for all health clinics regardless of size if they bill Medicare or Medicaid for services, with no testing option as an alternative.
The vaccine and testing requirements do not apply to employees who work exclusively from home or outdoors. OSHA has posted details on the “Emergency Temporary Standard” at www.osha.gov.
Significant uncertainty remains for companies that have vaccine mandates in place already or are moving ahead with an OSHA deadline now in place, said David Lewis, CEO of the Norwalk-based workplace consultancy OperationsInc. OSHA confirmed it is studying “the capacity of smaller employers” with regard to vaccination policy.
“It is a very interesting chess game and strategy session here, because with the volume of jobs that are available and the demand for workers, does that create a false sense of security for people who are unwilling to get vaccinated and feeling like they are going to find jobs elsewhere?” Lewis said. “Or is that an unrealistic expectation, because push is coming to shove?”
For employees that choose the testing option, face masks are required indoors and in vehicles with more than one passenger. Employers are not required to pay for COVID-19 tests.
OSHA officials said Wednesday they will conduct a program of inspections of U.S. businesses, with a standard penalty of $13,653 for each instance of noncompliance. Penalties could be more severe if OSHA determines employers are willfully flouting the new rules.
“It’s been pretty clear that
employers have the right to implement mandatory vaccination policies,” said Daniel Schwartz, an employment law attorney who is a partner in the Hartford office of Shipman & Goodwin. “What this OSHA [ruling] does is give employers an offramp to avoid that fight all together. They can say, ‘Fine — you need to be vaccinated, but if you don’t you just need to be tested. We’re not going to pick the fight.’”
The U.S. Census Bureau reports that Connecticut has more than 4,000 companies with at least 100 employees, which combined employ about 1 million people — more than half the workforce. In the aggregate, those payrolls total $72 billion annually.
More than a third of Connecticut business owners and managers signaled opposition to the concept of mandatory vaccines for their workers, among those responding to a Connecticut Business & Industry Association survey.
But many other businesses large and small set their own vaccination mandates well in advance of the White House directive. In some instances, those vaccination policies extend to staff of vendors they employ, Lewis, of OperationsInc., noted.
Lewis said it would not surprise him if the Jan. 4 deadline were pushed back if the new OSHA rules trigger a new stampede of legal challenges. And he noted that Merck and Pfizer have announced progress on pills that promise to greatly decrease the risk of hospitalization or death from COVID-19, with the United Kingdom approving Merck’s drug this week.
But if nothing else, Lewis said,the White House proclamations have been effective in getting larger numbers of people to get vaccinated who might otherwise have skipped doing so.
“What it’s doing is exactly what the administration hoped it would do,” he said, “which is — pun intended here — move the needle.”