Posted on 11/09/2022 2:32:31 PM PST by nickcarraway
The company I work for has weathered the pandemic okay. We’re a 100% in person, small U.S. manufacturing company. I’m HR, finance, many other things, and sometimes reception. Because of that, I’m in a unique position to know the vaccination status of all visitors (due to a Covid screening form they complete) and some details about health status for employees and their family members.
Until recently, all employees have been fully vaccinated (to the best of my knowledge). There is no “vaccines required” policy; any mention of that in the past has been shot down by management. It’s been hypothetical given everyone’s vaccination status, plus the owners aren’t keen on mandates. There is no longer a masking requirement at work, though people are free to wear them.
Recently we hired someone who is not Covid-vaccinated, according to their visitor info form. I shared that info with the person conducting the interview, now their direct manager, since he’d be meeting with him in the conference room. The new employee is working in a large, open manufacturing area and is almost always working at a bench on his own, so keeping distanced wasn’t a problem. However, work stations just got moved around. He’s now at a work station that directly faces the work station of someone who lives with a medically vulnerable family member, who is at risk of serious illness from even minor infections. When they are both at their work stations, they face each other, six feet apart.
Ethically, to me, the employee with the vulnerable family member needs to know they are working every day with someone who is unvaccinated, so that they can choose to mask up, change their work station placement, etc. But that would be disclosing medical info about a coworker, which normally I wouldn’t do. Though it shouldn’t figure into the decision about “the right thing to do,” complicating matters, the new guy’s role is one with some overlap of the existing employee’s role and the existing employee had their hackles up about the position even existing, felt threatened, and gave the new guy the cold shoulder for a couple of days.
As HR, and personally, I’m very cautious about Covid: still masking in public and avoiding crowds. At work I’m the person who reminds people about eye protection, safety gloves, etc. if I observe someone doing something that requires that. I’m lightly teased about about my focus on caution and safety. So though I’m willing to use my capital as needed to address this issue, I also suspect the owners and the manager involved might not share my level of concern over it (particularly given that they moved the one unvaccinated person to face — all day — the one person they know has an at-risk family member).
My initial impulse was to simply talk to the employee with the vulnerable family member, let him decide how he wants to proceed (by masking up, asking to move his work station, etc.). I could be vague about who, exactly, is not vaccinated … but he will likely see through that. Also, there may be other employees with similarly at-risk family members who I’m not aware of.
Any suggestions how I should proceed in this situation?
Agggh.
Morally, I’d argue that you should be able to tell the person with the at-risk family member that he’s facing an unvaxxed person all day long so he can take additional precautions if he wants to (like masking if he’s not been doing that).
But legally, you can’t share employees’ confidential medical info, which the EEOC says includes vaccination status.
Ideally, everyone in your workplace would assume that they don’t know other people’s vax status and just take whatever precautions they’d take if they knew for sure that someone was unvaxxed. And really, this is what everyone should be doing in situations where they don’t know the people around them very well. For some people, that won’t mean changing anything — they’ve decided being vaccinated themselves is enough. For other people, it will mean masking and/or other precautions.
However, if in the past your employees were told everyone there was vaccinated, you’ve got people operating with out-of-date information. Given that, it makes sense to remind everyone that the company doesn’t require vaccination and doesn’t share people’s vaccination status, and so if they are concerned about protecting themselves or high-risk family members, the company supports them in taking safety precautions like masking and adding more distance between work stations.
You could also ask the employee with the vulnerable family member if he’d prefer a work station with more distance around it — as a general safety precaution, not one specific to the person he’s near right now. If he’s not masking all day, that’s a good idea anyway since vaccination — while highly effective at preventing serious disease and death — doesn’t fully prevent infection, so his family member’s risk isn’t just from the unvaccinated new guy. In fact, this is worth offering to all employees if you can since, as you note, you don’t know who else might have at-risk loved ones they’d like to protect (or be at risk themselves).
If you discuss this with anyone, you are guilty of a multitude of crimes and could be subject to civil suits.
No, no one’s business, not even the employer. It is a private matter for the employee and their doctor.
“But that would be disclosing medical info about a coworker, which normally I wouldn’t do.”
(1 paragraph earlier):
“I shared that info with the person conducting the interview, now their direct manager, since he’d be meeting with him in the conference room.”
This person is a liar and a hypocrite. They are also very dumb.
No.
Mind your OWN friggin business and do YOUR job.
And they will get away with it. If this guy wrote a letter, I bet many other HR disclosed without thinking about it.
That point occurred to me with respect to requiring everyone who goes to university athletic events to show proof of having been injected with the poison vax.
It is stupid because almost everyone who attends university athletic events will have been in grocery stores standing very close to other people who may or may not have been injected with the poison vax.
The scenario you present there is one of the major reasons why I refused to implement a COVID vaccine reporting system in my own company — even after two of my biggest clients notified me in the fall of 2021 that I was obligated to do so in order to keep working for them.
My rationale was simple:
1. If I wasn’t checking for vaccines against hepatitis, polio, measles, etc., then why would I treat COVID any differently?
2. (To your point) … Would I be incurring some kind of legal obligation on the part of the company if I now had personal medical information about my staff that I didn’t have before? For anything not directly related to work performance, I always prefer to keep myself in a position where I could always truthfully plead ignorance if a question about it came up in a legal proceeding in the future.
A day after the first time I got asked by a customer whether the person who was scheduled to visit their facility was ‘vaxxed’, our company policy was created. This essentially stated that “asking employees for personal medical information was not something that our company would ever do since it was viewed as being immoral, unethical and had legal ramifications that the company had no intention of getting near”..…. and plenty of statues were quoted to support that position. Were clients and projects lost? Only one that I can think of and the other day they called and said they were desperate and could we still do their project.
As for non-EGT’d employee referred to in this piece, he should be grateful if the others want to give him more space…. Although not touched on in this piece, it seems that they are the ones who’ve seriously degraded their immune systems and are the ones getting sick. Personal anecdote… of the people I know who have stated that they are or are not EGT’d, the ones who are not have rolled through the WuFlu experience far more successfully and in fact, I know of almost no one without the shots who got sick. On the other hand, people like Walensky and Bye-Done who have been trumpeting their EGT status have had the WuFlu multiple times.
Has anyone claimed ever that the jab prevents people from transmitting the WuFlu?
HIPAA only prevents your health care providers from disseminating your health status. It does not prevent employers or anyone else from asking you to provide that information to them.
Is he also going to investigate if the new hire has been vaccinated for measles, chickenpox or mumps? What about hepatitis or tuberculosis? Why stop there. Check if he has gonorrhea or any other type of venereal disease. Good grief, what a busy body!
Has anyone claimed ever that the jab prevents people from transmitting the WuFlu?
Yes, it was claimed for a long time by Fauci and Biden, and many more. That’s why all the mandates. But that’s been proven false and acknowledged even by liberal sources. Why people hang on to it must be pure stupidity.
Yes
Yes, they claimed that many times. There is a video somewhere of Biden saying it.
Allison Greene: Who gives a rats ass about covid at the point? It’s a scam and you’re obviously part of it.
Get several boosters, shove a banana up your azz so you don’t get monkey pox and abort all your kids and family.
But that would be disclosing medical info about a coworker, which normally I wouldn’t do.
—
But apparently, sometimes you would disclose the info; which is illegal to do.
Before doing so, give your home address and tell whether or not you own a firearm. Jist to be safe.
What a stupid Karen.
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