ANALYSIS: Vaccine mandates are key to workplace safety
by Abigail Cartus and Abdullah Shihipar
A vaccine mandate rally. Credit: Hayley Tschetter/Flickr
Earlier this month President Biden signed an executive order directing the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a rule requiring employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination or weekly testing.
The president’s move tailed a piecemeal implementation of employer-based vaccination mandates. Among unions, these mandates have found a mixed reception. Some, like the AFA-CWA, argue that vaccination mandates are part and parcel of workplace safety; others, while not necessarily opposed to the idea of vaccination, emphasize that unions have the right to bargain over the impact and implementation of employer mandates. Following this logic, for example, the Civil Service Employees Association successfully sued to block a vaccine mandate for court workers in New York state.
Throughout the pandemic, it has been abundantly clear that workplaces are hotspots for transmission. One study of mobility data showed that lower income people were less likely to be able to stay home last year because they had to work. Workers in certain high-risk occupational settings like line cooks and farmworkers experienced much higher levels of infection and death than the general population. Employers—and the federal government—watched silently as the virus ripped through crowded workplaces, in some cases even placing bets on how many employees would get sick and die. In the absence of strong federal guidance, workers in many sectors have been forced to be de facto “mask police,” struggling to enforce public health measures amid threats and even violence from aggressive customers and anti-maskers. The country counted on so-called ‘essential workers’ assuming serious personal risk to keep the economy functioning, and the Biden administration has insulted their sacrifice by failing to take action to control the pandemic.
It’s understandable that some workers might feel coerced by an employer vaccine mandate after being forced to work through multiple lethal COVID surges with little more than a wish, a prayer, and an admonition to wear a mask while making good choices. However, it’s essential to think of the vaccines as a workplace safety measure rather than a personal choice. Employers choosing not to mandate vaccination is also coercive in the extreme, especially in the US where there is no federal policy to control COVID transmission. Mandates remove individuals’ ability to “choose” to put themselves and their coworkers at risk and forces employers to take at least some action toward creating a safe work environment.
Unfortunately, the Biden administration’s approach to the pandemic has been to devolve responsibility for protecting people from COVID to the smallest possible unit, often down to the individual. Instead of the robust public health response many were expecting, Biden’s response to the pandemic has been anemic and mostly rhetorical, shifting blame onto individuals who won’t be or haven’t been vaccinated—even as his administration failed to lift a finger while the Delta variant of the virus burned a swath of preventable death across the South eight months into his presidency. The Biden administration is committed to a vaccine-only strategy that has already demonstrably failed—over 100,000 people have died of the virus since his inauguration in January—at the expense of pursuing almost any other measures. An OSHA emergency temporary standard was promised, but when it finally arrived many weeks late it had been severely watered down and limited only to health care workers. This hands-off approach to governance in the pandemic era has forced the debate over vaccine mandates where it was never meant to go: onto the terrain of “personal choice” and “freedom.”
Of course, there are all sorts of structural reasons why someone may not be able to take a vaccine. Transportation issues, lack of paid leave, fear of side effects—these are all barriers to vaccination that unions have helped workers address. Unions across the country have helped workers find vaccine shots, set up on-site vaccination clinics for workers, and bargained successfully for paid sick leave. Organized labor has used its political muscle to advocate for a wide range of protections against COVID-19, from masking guidelines to hazard pay. Unions are uniquely positioned to fight for worker safety from the individual workplace up to the level of federal policymaking.
What’s more, unionized workers are no strangers to workplace health and safety protocols. At union construction sites, workers must wear certain gear to protect themselves and follow safety protocols specific to a range of tasks to protect both themselves and their coworkers. Unions and employers also bargain standards of behavior and grievance processes to prevent and redress sexual harassment, ensuring that all workers’ right to a safe work environment is protected. In both cases, an employer that allows employees to work without protective equipment or harass coworkers on the job would be negligent. Similarly, instead of the “choice” and “freedom” of the unvaccinated workers who are refusing the vaccine, the proper framework for understanding vaccine mandates is the constitutionally-guaranteed right of all workers to a safe work environment.
Litigating to ensure the rights of a few to make dangerous and destructive choices effectively nullifies this right for all workers, especially those who are disabled or immunocompromised. Some proportion of workers don’t want the vaccine because they have incorrect ideas about it; this is a legitimate (though regrettable) personal opinion, but not a legitimate basis on which to challenge vaccine requirements. Just as we wouldn’t design construction site safety protocols around the beliefs of people who don’t accept the theory of gravity, or hospital safety protocols around the beliefs of those who don’t accept germ theory, we cannot design public health interventions, even (especially) in the workplace, around the beliefs of COVID and vaccine deniers.
The “hierarchy of controls” is a tool developed by the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety (NIOSH) as a conceptual framework for controlling and mitigating workplace hazards. The diagram is an inverted pyramid, with the most effective hazard control strategy (physical elimination of the hazard) at the top and the least effective (personal protective equipment or PPE) at the bottom. Without a concerted federal strategy to remove the hazard by controlling COVID-19 transmission, the vaccines are PPE. The amount of discord there has been over the mandates perhaps inevitably reflects the exhaustion of managing a massive, traumatic public health emergency with little support and no leadership to speak of from policymakers.
Instead of litigating the mandates, which inevitably devolves into a race to the bottom to appease COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers, organized labor should use its collective power to demand better federal pandemic policy—to physically remove the hazard, and following down the hierarchy of controls, to employ every possible strategy to mitigate it. In fact, unions have already done this as they sounded the alarm on the need for mask mandates, distancing requirements, ventilation upgrades, hazard pay, and protective equipment early in the pandemic. These safety protocols should have never been treated as a substitute or an alternative to a vaccination mandate, but rather as complements to it.
Opposing vaccine mandates directs attention and blame towards the unvaccinated worker who won’t comply, rather than towards the employer who isn’t providing safe working conditions: or the federal government that sees continued, uncontrolled COVID spread and the waves of mass death that go along with it as a nuisance at best. Vaccination is extremely good PPE, but it ultimately offers only one layer of protection. Workers need all layers—no union safety representative would send a welder to work with a flame-resistant apron but no goggles, or a construction worker to the job site with boots but no hard hat. Mandates provide an essential opportunity to reframe the conversation about worker safety and what we and our government owe to the workers who carried this country through the darkest days of the pandemic.
Instead of an individual responsibility to be lightly managed with unenforceable guidelines from the executive branch, workers’ health and safety is a collective responsibility. Vaccination was and remains a crucial part of workplace safety plans and the risk from COVID, despite the Biden administration’s best efforts to blame unvaccinated people for their poor choices and move on, has not gone away. Vaccine mandates are protective equipment: fighting vaccine mandates while ignoring lax safety protocols and a lax approach to controlling the virus absolves employers and government alike of their legal responsibility to provide safe working conditions.
As for the shot itself: if you work for a paycheck, your family, your friends, your community, and your union need you alive. Take it easy, but take it.
Abigail Cartus is an epidemiologist with the People, Place and Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health where she works on reproductive health, overdose prevention, and health justice. From 2016-2020 she organized with the Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC-USW) at the University of Pittsburgh.
Abdullah Shihipar leads Narrative Projects & Policy Impact Initiatives at the People, Place and Health Collective at the Brown University School of Public Health. He has worked with labor unions and groups that represent farmworkers and food service workers in Canada and was actively involved in the Graduate Labor Organization at Brown University.