Vaccinations: Employers consider incentives, mandates
Businesses and hospitals are faced with a precarious balancing act, said Arielle Mitropoulos in ABCNews.com: “Ensuring their workplaces are safe without infringing on employees’ personal medical rights.” Many Americans “remain hesitant to take the vaccine,” so hospitals and other institutions that have begun offering the first inoculations have “resorted to creative solutions” to get more people to buy in. Houston Methodist, a large hospital in Texas, for instance, recently began offering a $500 “hope bonus” to any of its 26,000 workers who got vaccinated. The Los Angeles Fire Department is even offering its firefighters “prizes such as Canary home security cameras, Google Nest entertainment systems, Aventon fixed-gear bicycles, and gift cards for Airbnb and Lyft.”
Dollar General last week became the first major retailer to incentivize inoculations for its workers, said Sarah Krouse in The Wall Street Journal. The discount store said its 157,000 employees would receive four hours of pay if they got the shots. The company “will provide paid time off to staff who have adverse reactions to the vaccine,” although those are rare. Other large employers are considering providing “401(k) or other cash incentives, as they do to encourage use of other wellness benefits.” However, many companies, including Facebook, Marriott, and Discover, have been cautious about mandates, indicating they would “stop short of requiring” vaccines.
That attitude could change, said Liz Goodwin in The Boston Globe. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has said that workplaces can mandate the Covid-19 vaccine, just as it did in
2009 with the swine flu vaccine, “as long as some exemptions were included.” It’s possible that “a bevy of lawsuits would accompany any decision by a private sector company,” but some might feel mandatory vaccination is needed to get the economy back on track. Even if we could resolve the murky legal issues, that’s still a questionable idea, said Stephen Carter in Bloomberg.com. Business and society would be better off choosing “persuasion over punishment.” In addition to objections on religious grounds, there are “well-known historical reasons for racialized mistrust,” going back to “the testing of risky medical procedures on the South’s enslaved population.” Focus on educating people, not firing them.
There’s one more incentive that business is bringing to the table: Those who decline the vaccine may have a hard time planning their next vacation, said Monica Buchanan Pitrelli in CNBC .com. Qantas CEO Alan Joyce “referred to vaccinations as a ‘necessity’ for the airline’s international travelers,” and Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian echoed those remarks last month. Neither airline has announced a requirement yet. But hotels that require vaccinations could offer “a boutique sales pitch” to “tap into a ‘Covid-safe’ market.”