BART considers vaccine mandate for all employees
All BART employees would be required to be fully vaccinated by midDecember under a proposal by the regional rail agency’s Board of Directors.
Under the measure introduced by BART board Vice President Rebecca Saltzman, all of the agency’s employees and board directors would be required to get fully vaccinated by Dec. 13, “with exceptions made only for those who qualify for a reasonable accommodation or a religious exemption.” The criteria for a “reasonable accommodation” is unclear.
The proposal will be decided next week during a vote at the BART board meeting.
The proposal, which has support from at least four of the agency’s nine Board of Directors, was introduced as BART and other Bay Area transit agencies have struggled to vaccinate their workforces, particularly their frontline workers. The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency said this week that hundreds of the agency’s transit operators have not yet been vaccinated and risk being fired after the city’s Nov. 1 deadline. That could result in “chaotic” reductions to Muni service, the agency said.
“Our main goal here is keeping everyone safe — our employees and our riders — and continuing to have reliable service,” Saltzman told The Chronicle.
Until now, BART had relied on a strategy to encourage employees to get vaccinated and make vaccines more accessible, while the agency’s labor unions have been opposed to a vaccine mandate.
The agency has allowed workers to take paid time off work to get inoculated. It has organized several on-site employee vaccination clinics. BART officials lobbied for essential transit workers to gain priority access to vaccines as the state began rolling out vaccinations.
BART also offered employees two paid floating holidays if they got vaccinated and submitted proof by Sept. 15.
But despite the agency’s efforts, “we’re still not getting close to 100%,” Saltzman said.
According to BART, 79% of the agency’s employees 4,000-plus employees were fully vaccinated as of Sept. 29
Since mid-September, the pace of employee vaccinations has slowed down, Saltzman said.
“We’re just not sure, without having a mandatory policy, how else to get to close to 100% of workers vaccinated,” Saltzman said.
More public institutions across the Bay Area and nation are relying on employee mandates as a way to get their workers vaccinated. Several of these local mandates, so far, have been effective. Nearly 900 San Francisco employees who work in high-risk settings rushed to get vaccinated ahead of a Sept. 30 deadline.
But San Francisco’s transportation agency still had about 640 unvaccinated employees as of this week, and the agency is bracing for a worst-case scenario where Muni service is significantly pared down once unvaccinated transit workers are let go at the end of the month.
Consultants and contractors who work on BART property would also have to be vaccinated under the proposed measure. If the measure is passed by the Board of Directors, BART General Manager Bob Powers would then bargain with the agency’s labor unions “over the policy and impacts of this decision,” according to the proposal.
John Arantes, a transit vehicle mechanic and president of SEIU 1021’s BART chapter, said the union supports “100% vaccination” at BART. But Arantes, who is vaccinated and has tried to “motivate as many people as I can” to get vaccinated, said the union wants the agency to continue to lean on its strategy of attempting to educate employees and allow them to decide for themselves.
“To just mandate it and if you don’t (get vaccinated) you lose your job or anything like that, we think that’s the wrong way to go,” Arantes said.
BART board director Debora Allen agreed. Allen said in an email that she supports vaccines, though added, “I generally oppose, unless there is a testing option, employer-mandated COVID vaccines.”
“Patience, compassion and understanding is needed to continue to educate those unvaccinated workers of the risks taking without threatening them with their jobs,” Allen said.
Board directors in support of the proposed mandate said it’s partly in response to the pandemic’s disruptions of BART operations.
Since March 2020, 2,377 BART employees have taken pandemicrelated leave, according to the proposal’s text. Infection rates among unvaccinated employees have also been 54% higher than vaccinated workers since the delta variant became the region’s dominant coronavirus strain.
“Some of our most frontline employees have higher number of unvaccinated personnel, and so it’s really important to me because these are individuals who I believe are most at risk,” board director Bevan Dufty said.