You are looking for the legal reasoning used by the Biden Administration for his EO. Here’s what I’ve found:
See if those cites help your understanding.
Of one thing I am confident: Biden’s Administration will rest their decision on sound legal precedent, with Merrick Garland at the helm. I’m not personally worried that Biden has taken an unenforceable step. Even this SCOTUS has been reluctant to overturn case precedent in this area of law, according to news reporting I heard yesterday. Since the most compelling purpose of government is to protect the welfare of the public, Biden’s decision seems fundamentally appropriate.
What specific things does the form ask for? IOW how does the form ask you to show that your religious beliefs permit you to be exempt from the requirement?
I haven’t read the order itself but I did just listen to the speech. Biden didn’t order companies with over 100 employees to have all employees vaccinated. He said he would require, through a Labor Department rule, that those companies provide all their employees with time off to get the vaccine should those employees want to get it. That seems a lot more reasonable to me, and I see no issue with that.
Sounds like it’s the companies that will impose the rule for employees to be vaccinated as a condition of employment, not the government.
Thanks for the important clarification. I didn’t see the speech or read the EO, just assumed the assertions that Biden was requiring 100+ employers to have their employees vaccinated were true. I regret the assumption. I’ll read the text of the EO before commenting further in this thread.
Really I think the ins-and-outs of the vaccine mandate is a bit of a red herring (although a very noisy and distracting one). Either companies will comply or they won’t, and I’m not sure the lawsuits and the noise will make much of a difference. It is clearly established law that a private company can require vaccination if they want to.
There are two goals for this speech - one practical and one political.
Practically, there is basically only one thing that the federal government can do to control the pandemic, and that is increase vaccination rates. They have a few levers to do that, but I think the research seems to show that one of the most effective is having an employer mandate vaccination. They can obviously mandate it for federal workers, but that’s somewhat small potatoes. So you give big companies cover to do it - “just complying with OSHA”. Maybe some will refuse, but not that many IMO, especially not big ones.
Politically, they seem to have decided that there are basically two camps right now - those that just want everyone to get the damn shot and are getting pretty fed up with the nonsense refusal, and those that are full-throatedly in the “my body my choice” camp on this one. And it’s pretty clear that the first camp is larger.
There may also be a bit of a realization that things are pretty likely to normalize a bit in the not-too-distant future. Once Delta burns through the unvaccinated, and we get boosters in the vaccinated, we could have a nice 6-month window before the natural immunity wears off and we start seeing hot-spots again. There is a certain political wisdom in taking bold action to solve a problem when you have reason to believe the goal you are seeking may happen anyway.
That must have been in some text in the actual order. I just listened to that part of the speech again. He only says that he will require those companies to provide paid time off. He doesn’t mention anything about testing in that part of the speech.
From what I am reading, there is a basis in law for what Biden is doing, but it raises some novel legal questions. So it isn’t a matter of trusting, but of finding out at the same time Biden and Garland find out.
Prediction: If the virus seems to have peaked, the Supreme Court will rule for the few businesses led by anti-vaccine CEO’s. But if the virus is getting worse just when it gets to the Supreme Court, they won’t dare make an anti-vax ruling.
Oh, it’s pretty standard stuff. We ask them to describe the accommodation being requested, the religious belief/practice necessitating the accommodation, and any alternatives to the accommodations that might address their needs. When they sign off on it they also attest that this is a sincerely held religious belief of theirs no foolin’! It’s really not all that different from a medical accommodation except in those cases there’s some paperwork the physician needs to fill out.
Does this fall under the: “I belong to XYZ church and they forbid (or require as the case may be) this action.” Or is it more along the lines of: “I have a strongly held personal belief that this particular vaccine has not been properly vetted” type of thing?
It seems to me that a claim like:
“I am a life long Roman Catholic and refuse to have an abortion on religious grounds” holds a stronger argument and is less likely to be abused than-
“I have been been vaccinated for many other purposes in my younger days but don’t want to take THIS vaccine because I am a believer” seems weak and ripe for abuse to me.
While there have been individual preachers and self proclaimed “prophets” who speak against the COVID 19 vaccines, I am not aware of any denomination or sect who flatly resist the vaccines. There is also (or at least was) one faith community that asks its members to refuse all medical treatment. That would seem like a valid accommodation to me, any of the conspiracy theory based objections do not.
Can Human Resources simply say that they have considered the claim and find it to have no merit? Is it reasonable for the company to say the claims you are making have been proven to be false and we reject your claim? Because I can see the potential for some rural areas to have 100% of yet unvaccinated employees make a request for accommodation and this whole thing moving the needle none at all if everyone who asks for accommodation is granted one.
It’s got to be a strongly held religious belief to receive any form of protection. If it’s just a personal belief we don’t need to worry about accommodating it. But, yes, if it’s the first then we’d have to consider the accommodation request.
The definition of religion is rather broad and not limited to mainstream beliefs. Best practice is to assume that someone making a request for a religious accommodation is sincere in their beliefs. And just because the Southern Baptist Convention hasn’t come out against vaccines if some backwater preacher convinces his congregation that it’s the mark of the beast then it’d be hard for us to argue that it isn’t a sincerely held religious belief.
Here’s the thing with religious accommodations, if it has more than a de minimis cost or burden to the company we don’t have to accommodate religious belief. Part of our problem is that our employees have been teleworking for the better part of a year-and-a-half now. They’ve already got the equipment and the plan is that we’ll be working in the office part time during the week once we return to the office anyway. Allowing someone to telework really doesn’t cost us anything. Does an accommodation place an undue burden on the company? In some cases, yes. Customer facing workers who interact with the public can’t telecommute and we really can’t afford to have them unvaccinated because it places a burden on other employees and our customers by risking exposure to COVID. But if Bob in accounting can easily continue to telework at no additional cost to the company it’s hard to argue that his vaccine accommodation is a burden.
I’m honestly out-of-my depth here as this is a new experience for me. Like I said, the religious accommodations I’ve run into so far in my career have been no-brainers and I don’t think I’ve run across a single person I thought was trying to game the system to their advantage. Maybe this won’t be as bad as I think but it’s already causing headaches. One of my coworkers was cussed out by an employee who was pissed off about the vaccination policy. Not sure what’s going to come of that.
I personally know a few people who are not only willing, but eager to die on this hill (metaphorically), a couple of them retired pastors who see anything done by a Democratic politician as “overreach” but oddly saw nothing in Trump’s entire administration as overreach or even unusual. (Only wondered why we haven’t always done it that way??) Others are reluctant and really don’t want the shot for purely political reasons, but will comply if they have to.
My neighborhood and social circle are pretty ruby red (despite how sincerely I have abandoned those views) and I see them as fifty/fifty with almost no one in the middle. Half will just comply out of resignation – the other half want to be very vocal martyrs choosing to lose their jobs on TV “for the cause”.
Is there anyone in this thread who can guesstimate if Biden’s Executive Order effectively reaches fifty or sixty percent of the unvaccinated, will that get us close to herd immunity?
I’m not a specialist, but my understanding is “herd immunity” is a bit of a white whale, but I think target rates for vaccination are like 80%+.
In the entire US, we are at 55% fully vaxxed - that’s of population, not just those eligible. If you look at age groups for which a vaccine is available (data here: Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) - Symptoms and causes - Mayo Clinic) you see that 18-24 is at about 50% fully vaxxed (61% 1 dose). If you got half of the unvaxxed, you would be at 75% fully vaxxed (80% 1-dose) in that age group, which is a massive improvement and gets you very close to a protective state.
Other age groups are even closer to that 80% mark, and getting 50-60% of the unvaxxed would do it.
It is a good concept. 80% probably isn’t enough, but the idea is sound, with a major caveat. The original idea is that there will be a small number of vulnerable unvaccinated people spread throughout the population. People who are immunocompromised, have an actual allergy to the vaccine, etc. If those people are randomly scattered throughout the population, the idea holds. It’s when we’re dealing with pockets of non-vaccinated people who aren’t randomly spread out, but concentrated in particular areas, that the idea no longer works.
Yeah, that is certainly true. At some point there is only so much you can do, sadly… I think a steady state where you get periodic hot spots in populations where vaccination rates are low is perhaps the best case right now.
One possibility is that once vaccination rates get high enough, if deaths are still overwhelmingly in the unvaccinated people will slowly give up their objections. Politics is one thing, but serious illness and death is another.
Yeah, my issue is that I grew up thinking that we lived in a representative democracy. You know, the whole, call your legislator and introduce a bill? Not just dictates from an executive like a king. And no, I’m not just complaining about Biden. It’s been done for far too long.
But I’ve read the answers, and the religious exemption seems very porous. May I just say that I have faith in God that he will take care of Covid and that is it? I don’t go to church, but that is my understanding from reading various religious texts. Does HR cross examine me? Are businesses tasked with the knowledge to say that an individual is full of shit in his purported religious belief?
I agree that HR representatives are going to be placed in the unfair position of having to answer ridiculous questions. What a shame that people refuse to get vaccinated.