In a statement clearly intended to head off the ongoing bad press from the nightmare holiday travel weekend Southwest Airlines just endured, with thousands of canceled flights, company CEO Gary Kelly is heaping blame on the Biden administration for imposing vaccine mandates and says his employees should seek a religious or medical accommodation if they choose. Despite claims from the airline and the union representing Southwest pilots that the flight cancellations were not due to a company-wide pilot “sick out,” the circumstances of the delays still remain in doubt and unclear.
Speaking on CNBC Tuesday, Kelly said he is not in favor of corporate Covid-19 vaccine mandates but also says his company is trying to comply with President Biden’s executive order:
“I’ve never been in favor of corporations imposing that kind of a mandate. I’m not in favor of that, never have been,” Kelly told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Tuesday regarding the COVID-19 vaccine.
Kelly said his employees “have very strong views on both sides” of the issue of vaccine mandates but they were being forced to take it given Biden’s executive order.
“The executive order from President Biden mandates that all federal employees and then all federal contractors, which covers all the major airlines, have to have a mandate vaccine in place by Dec. 8 so we’re working through that,” Kelly said.
The CEO said Southwest is urging all employees to get vaccinated because his goal is to make sure none of his employees lose their jobs.
“If they can’t (get vaccinated), we’re urging them to seek an accommodation either for medical or religious reasons,” Kelly said. “The objective here, obviously, is to improve health and safety, not for people to lose their jobs.”
For Kelly to come out now and blame Biden solely for his company’s predicament is sort of scapegoating the problem. The Biden administration, via OSHA, has yet to provide businesses with the framework or requirements for their employees to be vaccinated, but some employers are pushing ahead on their own, including Southwest. In essence, the airline doesn’t have to be moving this fast and making threats to their employees who could be fired if they don’t comply by a certain date.
The press over the past few days must have been so bad that Kelly felt obligated to come out and save face with the traveling public and with his own employees. It’s true that Biden’s vaccine mandate, a potentially unconstitutional top-down dictatorial approach to public health, is at least partially to blame as companies will eventually be forced to comply.
However, businesses still have autonomy when it comes to accepting medical or religious accommodation, and some companies are more lenient in that regard than others. A business would be entirely compliant with Biden’s mandate to require employee vaccination, while still offering generous accommodation on medical or religious grounds without the need for counseling, badgering, or a specific medical diagnosis.
If it’s true that pilots did contribute to the problem with a “sick out” over the weekend, Kelly is likely doing damage control to prevent similar problems moving forward into the upcoming holiday travel months of November and December.
