For one, “Mexican” is a protected class while “Unvaccinated” is not.
The religious are welcome to drag their crosses up and down the street. Be careful at crosswalks though.
What exactly ARE the religious exemptions? Details.
Okay …
How is this different from (new ludicrous example) Trump issuing an executive order that all corporations with more than 100 employees serve only hamburgers in their lunchrooms?
I would change that to “you can’t participate in society until you do” Screw religious exemptions whatever they are. And of course health issues.
But everyone else HAS to step and get the vaccine. Trump uncovered the rocks of all his supporters, and now we have over 600,000 dead. Double what it might be. And these morons are trying to prolong this.
OSHA is already charged policing workplace safety. I doubt that have an extensive list of every possible safety hazard. Working in close contact with unvaccinated (or untested) people during a pandemic is a safety hazard.
The Republicans have started protesting this unholy infringement on their Constitutional Right to injure and/or kill others through willful negligence and/or ignorance.
Yup. Hard hats, safety googles, orange vests… the list will go on, and on and on. All of that is kind of a pain in the ass to wear. But it is done.
A simple injection? Some won’t do it.
No Shirt. No Shoes. No Service.
This serves the public good, while mandating that all corporations with more than 100 employees serve only hamburgers in their lunchrooms does not.
However, if when Trump was in office he tried to pass such a mandate by claiming that it WAS in the public good, I wouldn’t think that should be stopped on constitutional grounds. Rather, we would all have to decide whether we agreed with Trump’s policy or not when we are voting at the next election.
Completely agree. But that doesn’t answer my question as to whether OSHA rules can be created spontaneously via executive order, instead of the standard and laborious bureaucratic process.
This is my issue right here. While I agree with Biden on this and would obviously disagree with Trump, if our system and constitution look on both equally I’d say there’s something seriously wrong.
Just to play devils advocate, what if we change “Mexican” to “Democrats.”
That’s pretty much how I personally feel but professionally I can’t express that.
I haven’t gotten any yet but I’ve had some employees tell me they plan on filling out the religious exemption form and I’m not sure how we’re going to handle those requests. Most of the religious accommodations I’ve dealt with have been relatively simple and straightforward no-brainers like Muslims asking us to accommodate their need to pray or for Hindus to take a day off to observe their holidays. These accommodations are not at all disruptive, don’t cost us anything, and most importantly don’t have the potential to harm others.
The good news is that we don’t have to jump through hoops to make religious accommodations for employees like we do for disabilities. If the cost is more than “de minimis,” we don’t have to accommodate. But even if we’re in the right, it’s going to be stressful dealing with this over the course of the next few weeks. If anything, Biden’s announcement might take some of the heat off of us. Yeah, we announced our policy before Biden did, but if you jump to another company they’re going to have the same requirements about the vaccine.
I don’t know what to tell you. That’s how democracy works. If enough people want something stupid done, then something stupid can happen, and the system isn’t designed to stop that from happening*.
*in a way, it WAS designed to prevent that - the Founding Fathers were elitist assholes who assumed that if they only let white landowners vote, and anyways their votes don’t really matter because they’re actually just picking electors who are the smart guys who make the real decisions, then everything would be OK. Since then we’ve learned that plenty of rich people are enormously stupid.
That’s targeting of political opponents which is anti-democratic in and of itself. And same with if it was “Republicans” of course.
Democracy = The president can tell private businesses what to do, based exclusively on what he/she perceives as serving the public good?
I understand executive orders for government-related matters and areas like airports and roads which are owned and/or tightly overseen by the government. But I’m uncomfortable with the president being able to simply tell me and my (hypothetical) 101-person business that I have to (or can’t) do something.
Not trying to be belligerent – I really want to hear why this is permissible.
No, my point is in response to this:
A democracy has to look on both the stupid idea and the good idea equally, because if we had some system above and not beholden to democratic means telling us “no, this thing the people want to do is stupid” then we don’t have a real democracy, and we have to trust that TPTB’s definition of “stupid” isn’t “puts me out of power”.
If your point is that neither Biden’s order nor Trump’s hypothetical one should be allowed, then you DO in fact want “our system and constitution [to] look on both equally” 
But I’m not talking about all stupid and good ideas; obviously the “system” (three branches, checks and balances, etc.) has to apply equally to all of them.
I’m talking about stupid and good ideas in executive orders. If Biden’s corporate vaccine mandate and Trump’s corporate hamburger mandate are equally valid, what’s to stop the next Trump from mandating hamburgers?
Why does anything need to stop him from mandating hamburgers?
It’s a bad policy, but it doesn’t unfairly discriminate against some Americans due to membership in a protected class (maybe Hindus who don’t eat beef could request that veggie burgers be available as well). It isn’t on its face illegal (maybe if you could show that Trump signed the order in exchange for campaign contributions for Ronald McDonald who is providing the burgers).
After all, Trump unilaterally allocated emergency funds towards another stupid solution that did not actually address the problem it was meant to solve (the wall). So your example already happened, and yeah, nothing stopped him.
OK, I give up. I’m not talking about the pros and cons of a hamburger mandate. I’m trying to talk about the pros and cons (and, more precisely, validity in a supposedly democratic and free enterprise system) of a president being able to mandate such things to private businesses.
(So maybe I don’t give up. 
)
What I objected to was you saying that the law shouldn’t view the mask/vaccine mandate equally with a burgers mandate. It doesn’t sound like you actually think that those two mandates should be treated differently though, so we may have been speaking past one another 