Despite numerous legal setbacks for President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates and significant opposition among the general public to punishing offenders of such decrees, major corporations are proceeding with their own mandates that carry penalties ranging from reduced benefits to termination.
Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain by revenue, announced Tuesday that, starting next year, it “will no longer provide paid COVID-19 leave for unvaccinated employees and will apply a $50 monthly health insurance surcharge to salaried non-union workers who are unvaccinated and enrolled in a company healthcare plan,” wrote Reuters. Kroger has nearly 500,000 employees.
But benefit losses and surcharges are nothing compared to what Google has in store for its employees. Based on leaked internal documents, CNBC reported Tuesday:
A memo circulated by leadership said employees had until Dec. 3 to declare their vaccination status and upload documentation showing proof, or to apply for a medical or religious exemption. The company said after that date it would start contacting employees who hadn’t uploaded their status or were unvaccinated, as well as those whose exemption requests weren’t approved.
The document said employees who haven’t complied with the vaccination rules by the Jan. 18 deadline will be placed on “paid administrative leave” for 30 days. After that, the company will put them on “unpaid personal leave” for up to six months, followed by termination.
Employees will be able to retain their benefits for the first 92 days of their unpaid personal leave period.
The policy will apply to virtually all Google employees, even if they work from home. The company plans to require workers to return to offices three days a week beginning sometime next year, so any exemptions for remote workers would soon become moot, anyway.
Meanwhile, on Monday, the country’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co., informed its employees that they would not be allowed to work in its Manhattan offices unless they are vaccinated, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“The bank had previously allowed unvaccinated staff to work in its Manhattan offices if they were tested twice a week,” penned the paper. “It had already limited their ability to travel and attend meetings, either internally or with clients. And it had said they would bear some of the expense by paying higher healthcare costs in 2022.”
Since JPMorgan, in the Journal’s words, “has taken a relatively hard-line approach on curtailing work-from-home,” the new policy essentially means that the tenth of its workforce that hasn’t been vaccinated has been put on notice that they had better get the jab or lose their jobs.
While JPMorgan claimed it was instituting its latest vaccination policy in response to New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s recent dictate that everyone in her state, regardless of vaccination status, wear a mask in indoor public places that do not require vaccination for entry, Google explicitly tied its policy to Biden’s vaccine mandate for companies with 100 or more employees. “We expect that almost all roles at Google in the US will fall within the scope of the executive order,” said the memo.
That mandate, of course, has been put on hold by a federal judge; the same fate has befallen Biden’s other vaccine edicts. Yet neither the injunctions nor a petition signed by hundreds of Google employees opposing the company’s vaccine policy has done anything to dampen the far-left Google executives’ enthusiasm for a mandate that violates the catchphrase of one of their other favorite causes: “My body, my choice.”
Indeed, all these companies seem not to care much about how either their employees or their customers feel about forced vaccinations. A new Axios-Ipsos poll finds that half of Americans think companies shouldn’t be able to deny employment to people who haven’t gotten their shots. “The survey,” noted Margaret Telev, “shows there’s deep, bipartisan resistance — even from those who support vaccine and mask mandates — to imposing severe consequences on those who won’t go along.”
At the top of America’s corporate elite, however, the completely unscientific belief in the threat of COVID-19 and the safety and efficacy of the vaccines is such that “those who won’t go along” must be punished, possibly with loss of employment — even if doing so alienates half of their customer base.
