Join us as we go through why the 6th Circuit removed the OSHA Stay. what we think will happen, and expressed our dismay at having to do this the last week of the year. We should be watching movies, eating fudge, and drinking bubble water, but no. We’re complying with OSHA.
You’re absolutely right: COVID-19 should never have been politicized. But, it was. And those who politicized it appear to be winning. How else to explain people arguing — with a straight face — that a disease that has killed over 800,000 Americans is not a “grave danger” to workers? Or that the employers’ costs of tracking the testing of their unvaccinated employees is somehow more significant than the threat to all their employees’ lives absent vaccination-or-testing mandates? I live within the 5th Circuit’s jurisdiction, and practiced law under it for decades. I fully understand why the 5th is widely-regarded as the most conservative and most-politicized Circuit in the Country. But, I also recognize that our current Supreme Court — politically — more closely resembles the 5th Circuit than the 6th, so have little hope that the OSHA rule will survive. As a practical matter, vaccine mandates appear to be working. When faced with the choice between remaining unvaccinated and losing their jobs, the vast majority of vaccine holdouts got vaccinated. Omicron may — thus far — appear milder than Delta, for example. But, as long as large numbers of people remain unvaccinated, the virus will continue to mutate, and — at some point — may present in a form as transmissible as Omicron, or worse, but as deadly as AIDs or Ebola once were. Government’s highest duty is to defend its constituents. That’s what OSHA’s attempting to do. Like everything created by humans, its efforts are imperfect, and subject to fair criticism. But, they need to keep on trying. And, in the meantime, employers need to come up with their own plans to protect their workers. Unlike employers, employees are not under a General Duty to ensure a safe workplace. But individual employees do have a moral duty to protect themselves, their co-workers, and society in general, and if everyone did, we wouldn’t still be having this problem.
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