There Is No OSHA Vaccine Mandate

I've been posting on the information I've seen that there's in fact no realistic way OSHA can enforce a mandate that all employers of more than 100 people require them to be vaccinated in the name of "workplace safety". In fact, given the constraints of regulatory rule making, this would likely take so long that any COVID crisis would be over long before such a rule could go into effect.

This report on a question posed by a reporter to Press Secretary Psaki makes the situation even clearer.

The absence of even a scintilla of material to indicate the White House or any federal agency is organizing an action plan of how to structure the guidance itself is telling. The silence of the machine tells us it is not turned on. The bureaucracy has not been triggered. The machinery of the federal government has not been instructed to begin any process to execute on the instruction that OSHA will, “develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated.” Nothing.

As the piece indicates,

[T]he White House has no idea what the current plan is for OSHA to create this rule that will require a national mandate for private sector workers. The emphasis is on voluntary compliance as an outcome of the decree that a mandate would be forthcoming.

In fact, this part of the plan is working. Consider United Airlines:

United Airlines is preparing to fire almost 600 employees who failed to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccination policy by the Sept. 27 deadline, company executives told employees Tuesday.

United was one of the first major US companies to announced [sic] a vaccine mandate for its 67,000 US employees, the overwhelming majority of whom have complied.

, , , President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that his administration will mandate that companies with over 100 employees require their employees get vaccinated or have them test regularly for the virus.

Company executives, though, have said the announcement was light on specifics and are awaiting details so they can implement a plan.

The problem for a company like United that goes ahead with "voluntary compliance" is that while this may provide a pretext for the action and allow some degree of both virtue signaling and public relations cover, it still leaves the company open to legal challenge. The story above says,

United did not provide a breakdown of the kinds of employees who haven’t yet been vaccinated, but nearly 400 workers represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers had not uploaded proof of vaccination by Tuesday, District 141 President Mike Klemm told CNBC.

The union represents more than 25,000 United employees.

Klemm said the union plans to file wrongful termination grievances if the workers who refused to be vaccinated are fired, according to the outlet.

And I'm still left with the question of what is a valid "proof of vaccination", especially if it's something you "upload", as the story puts it. Do you upload an image of your vax certificate? Can't this easily be photoshopped? I went on the web and found this:

Seems like I could edit this into something with my name on it just with MS Paint, cut and paste a photocopy and scan it, or buy something better on the black market. How does United's HR department have the time and resources to check 60,000 of these things?

The only bright side for United is what's implied in the Dilbert cartoon above. If a vaccination mandate requires a company to fire X percent of its workers, that's basically a free pass to downsize without a buyout for the workers who are cut. I'm surprised that more companies don't go for this, except that maybe the smarter ones are recognizing that "voluntary compliance" isn't a free pass, and in the end, nearly all whom they terminate will either get hefty settlements or be reinstated.