Speaking on Thursday, the CEO of Delta Airlines labeled President Biden’s nationwide employer vaccine mandate as “divisive” and said his company is not trying to get in fights with employees over their vaccination status. Instead, Delta is taking the long view that getting a vaccination rate over 90% is adequate and accounts for religious and medical exemptions without trying to threaten their workers with job loss over a medical procedure they don’t want.
Unlike Southwest and American airlines, two companies that are threatening to fire employees who don’t show proof of vaccination by a company-imposed deadline, Delta is taking a different tact without the use of mandates.
Here is the Delta CEO, Ed Bastian, speaking with Liz Claman on Thursday explaining how his company has chosen to work with employees first and foremost, and worry about government mandates later:
https://twitter.com/disclosetv/status/1449418958281617413
As Bastian almost shockingly notes in the video, Delta will not be seeking to fire employees who seek religious or medical accommodation and wish to continue working unvaccinated:
Bastian acknowledged that there will need to be religious and medical accommodations made for those who wish to remain unvaccinated while avoiding having to threaten employment status.
“By the time we’re done, we’ll be pretty close to fully vaccinated as a company without going through all the divisiveness of a mandate,” he said. “We’re proving that you can work collaboratively with your people, trusting your people to make the right decisions, respecting their decisions and not forcing them over the loss of their jobs.”
Although it seems like Delta is still pushing vaccinations, they’re not mandatory and they’re not imposed with threats of job loss. It would seem impossible and improbable for any company with tens of thousands of employees to reach a pure 100% vaccination status, it’s just not going to happen. Getting 90% of employees who accept a vaccination without protest should be acceptable given the extremely high survival rate of Covid-19 among healthy individuals. Furthermore, many who seek accommodation have already been infected and possess natural immunity, something that is rarely accounted for when vaccine mandates are imposed.
So far, Delta is the only remaining airline that has not taken up a policy of forced vaccinations on their employees, a move that makes them an exception to the rule of companies bowing to government pressure and seeking to erase individual liberties.
Some airline workers are already winning in court, with a judge temporarily halting United Airlines from placing unvaccinated workers on unpaid leave while litigation is pending:
The vaccine diktats, however, are also being challenged in courts. Six employees of United Airlines, which was the first U.S. carrier in August to require vaccinations for all domestic employees, have filed a class action in federal court in Texas accusing the company of unlawfully denying religious and medical exemptions from the vaccine mandate.
Ahead of a hearing on Wednesday, the court on Tuesday temporarily restrained United from placing on unpaid leave any employee who receives religious or medical exemptions.
U.S. airlines have a number of federal contracts. Delta said the contracts are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Many have pointed out that several airlines, most of them in fact, have contracts with the federal government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. These deals place them in the designated class of government contractors which means, as per President Biden’s likely unconstitutional order, the airlines are supposed to be imposing Covid vaccine mandates on their employees or risk losing their contracts. The result has created a situation for employees rejecting the vaccine to feel as though their work for the company, sometimes decades worth, is being thrown away in favor of complying with federal overreach and short-term compliance.
Only time will tell if Delta continues to hold out in this regard, but at least they appear to be making an effort to take care of the employees without immediately throwing them under Joe Biden’s forced vaccination bus.
