Elizabeth Hovde of the Washington Policy Center is hopeful the bill and others will ensure lawmakers openly discuss how the mandate brings no demonstrable public health benefit while taking away people’s livelihoods and harming state services.
Elizabeth Hovde
Washington Policy Center
Rehire state employees who were fired because of the state’s vaccine mandate? Yes, please.
House Bill 1029, which was prefiled on Dec. 12 by Rep. Cyndy Jacobsen, R-Puyallup, concerns the reemployment of state workers dismissed from employment due to vaccine mandates. Should it receive legislative consideration and support, it could help bring some of the healing balm our state needs after Gov. Jay Inslee’s vaccine mandate left thousands of people in its wake.
The bill says that the governor’s proclamations making COVID-19 vaccination a condition of employment within executive branch agencies “created unnecessary hardship for many state employees. In addition, not allowing qualified, experienced employees to work in their professions does nothing to benefit the state, especially during this time of worker shortages.”
It continues, “The Legislature intends to create a pathway for those employees to be reemployed in their former positions if they choose. It is also the intent of the Legislature to encourage local governments and private sector employers to create pathways to reemploy employees who have lost their jobs due solely to vaccine mandates.” The bill reasonably lays out circumstances in which the state would not have to rehire a worker, and it does not say anything about back pay.
It’s not clear to me how this bill would work on its own, given the governor’s permanent vaccine mandate proclaimed last summer. Rules for the permanent vaccine mandate were made by the Office of Financial Management in the fall. They were adopted by OFM Director David Schumacher and became effective Nov. 4.
The Legislature needs to be sure to try and remove that misguided and outdated employment standard, along with reemploying those who lost their jobs during the state of emergency. Hindering the state by excluding qualified prospective employees with a COVID-19 vaccine mandate isn’t wise
HB 1029 would be good for improving state service levels expected by taxpayers. More importantly, it would restore some of the livelihoods that were taken away unnecessarily. It might even help knock out some of the ill will the government created toward those who chose not to be vaccinated, because of various assessments of risk factors and/or doctor-patient decisions.
The state mistreated its unvaccinated workers. A vaccinated worker who is still employed can contract and spread COVID-19, while an unvaccinated worker might not. The vaccine mandate also applies to working-age people, not the elderly — the people most often getting sick and dying from or with COVID-19. That nullifies the argument some shifted to once it became clear unvaccinated and vaccinated people could contract and spread the disease After that was well known, Inslee reasoned that the vaccine mandate served to protect state health resources.
We’ll follow HB 1029 this legislative session. I’m hopeful this bill and others will ensure lawmakers openly discuss how the mandate brings no demonstrable public health benefit while taking away people’s livelihoods and harming state services.
Elizabeth Hovde is a policy analyst and the director of the Centers for Health Care and Worker Rights at the Washington Policy Center. She is a Clark County resident.
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The Covid vaccine mandate decreed by Washington State’s Governor Inslee is discriminatory and no longer based in science. The CDC Is clear that the vaccine does not, and never has, prevented the spread or infection of this virus, therefore vaccinated individuals in the workplace DO NOT promote a “higher level of safety for co-workers”. Bill 1029 would serve better if there was clarification added that the mandates should be removed completely, affecting all workers including small cabinet and NEW HIRES. As written, the decree prohibits Washington State citizens who are unvaccinated from gainful employment with the state in perpetuity, even though there is no longer a covid emergency. This is discriminatory and self-defeating. The number of citizens who are vaccinated will change as the younger working demographic ages; most young children are not vaccinated. As years go by, there will be less and less vaccinated people available for employment in this state. As Covid’s lethality steadily declines, it is not logical to demand only covid vaccinated people for employment moving forward.
The only accurate benefit offered by Governor Inslee for these mandates is that The vaccine *may* prevent an individual from having more serious illness (though we now know that there is no clinical proof of this). He comments that it will “prevent our employees from missing work when they are sick with Covid”. That is not a valid reason for a mandate. Does he not hire people with other pre-dispositions for illness because they *might* get sick? Does he hire diabetics? Smokers? People with obesity? High blood pressure? Obviously a ridiculous thought. Covid may or may not make a person seriously ill, indeed we now know that most people are NOT seriously ill, vaccinated or not. The vaccines are not a predictable indicator of this and in fact, statistically more covid deaths are now occurring among the vaccinated. This is not even close to being a justification for denying someone employment. The rule must be revoked in light of new scientific proof.
The state of emergency has been declared ended, it follows that the emergency mandates should be over with as well. These vaccines were authorized for emergency use only and the FDA approved vaccines (e.g. “Comirnity”) are not yet being manufactured. The technicality that there was a “work around” to be able to refer to the vaccines “FDA approved” notwithstanding. Every day we are now learning of potential grave potentially life threatening issues with these vaccines. Importantly, it is within an individual’s rights to accept responsibility for the possibility they may become ill, it is not ethical for the governor to control a person’s health choices. This sort of coercion has no place in our state. Workers are suffering, agencies are suffering and Washington State citizens are suffering from insufficient services. Borrowing workers from outside of the state to circumvent the mandate is not a practical option. Remove the mandate from all state employment requirements. Allow Washington State citizens to make their own health decisions with the expert counsel of their doctors and health professional, not their governor.
Well stated!
Not only should workers who were forced out because they refused to get vaccinated not be offered their old jobs back, they should be barred from ever holding a job in the state government.
Your comment is rediculous and without merit.
Cal, I understand the viewpoint you make but feel that banning people for life from State government jobs goes too far considering that we now know that people who are fully vaccinated can still contract Covid. I agree that it is concerning that people refused to comply when we were in the middle of a crisis, but I also fully understand the strong reluctance to have something completely untested injected into my body. We still really do not know the long term ramifications of that. As an alternative to banning employment, past employees could apply for openings that come up in typical circumstances and be rehired but possibly not in their former position. Presumably, those positions, if essential, were filled as needed during the crisis and those people would have to be moved or terminated to allow for past employees to return and I don’t think that is fair either. Past employees could be given preference for open positions, provided they were in good standing from their previous employment experience, over people that have not been State employees previously. This seems a more equitable solution to this situation rather than making a bill or law mandating that people who were terminated due to vaccination non-compliance, be reinstated into former positions that may already have been filled.
As a former resident of Clark county for a decade, a graduate of WSU-Vancouver, and having been employed in Vancouver for almost a decade, as well as giving birth to my firstborn child there, I am deeply concerned about the barriers to employment, financial well being and integration in the community imposed by the vaccine mandates. I am relocating back to Clark county with my family very soon and really hope these mandates can be revoked in order to keep our community unified and reinstate bodily autonomy as a human virtue.