SHARE leaders are meeting with management to negotiate the impact of the UMass Memorial vaccine mandate on SHARE members. Below is more information about the on-going negotiations between SHARE and UMass Memorial about the vaccine mandate.
As you may know from related posts on the SHARE blog, including this previous post about negotiating the mandate, SHARE has made its interests clear: everyone should be able to come to the hospital safe from COVID, and SHARE members need to keep their jobs.
Waiting for Details of the Federal Executive Order about Healthcare Workers Vaccination Mandate
The hospital expects to get clearer information from the government sometime in October about the rules attached to the executive order mandating vaccines in healthcare institutions that get funding from Medicaid and Medicare. These guidelines could override some of the ideas we had been discussing – too early to tell. Federal guidelines may not, for example, allow employers to have a frequent testing alternative to being vaccinated, or rules could make clear if employees who work from home are included in the vaccine mandate.
Exemptions & Accommodations
The hospital has made available religious and medical exemption forms on The Hub.
The exemptions are a 2-step process:
1. First the application will be copied with no name or job title so that they are anonymous, and then sent to either the religious or medical exemption committee. The committees will have representatives of Human Resources, Employee Health, Office of the General Counsel, Operations, Infection Control, and a chaplain for the religious exemption committee. The religious exemption committee will look to determine if receiving a vaccine violates a sincerely held religious belief, practice, or observance. The committees will decide whether or not to grant each exemption.
2. If a caregiver is granted an exemption, then their case is then reviewed individually to decide if their department can grant an accommodation for them to work without the vaccine. The Infection Control department is creating a policy about what accommodations are acceptable in which kinds of situations. It sounds like the accommodation decisions could be different depending on how much contact the caregiver has with other people: for employees who work with patients, those who work in an office, or those who work-from-home. For example, Infection Control could decide that wearing a mask without being vaccinated is not enough protection against the Delta variant for the patient contact involved for that kind of job. Management says that if the risk is too great to co-workers or patients with the employee remaining unvaccinated, the employee will be allowed to consider vacant positions elsewhere in the hospital where their exemption may be accommodated. They say that if there are no other positions available and the caregiver remains unvaccinated, there will be a disciplinary process that will ultimately end in separation from employment.
SHARE’s position is that it’s good that each situation will be looked at individually, and that the SHARE member should be involved in discussions about their options, with help from a SHARE Rep. SHARE’s position is that if there are no other options, including testing (see next section), then the “separation from employment” should be considered a lay-off, since the requirements of the job have changed.
Testing and Masking as an Alternative to the Vaccine?
The SHARE team’s position is that we are trying to find an alternative to the COVID vaccine for SHARE members who really don’t want it, so that no one loses their job over this.
The SHARE team asked for the hospital’s position about whether there could be an alternative that could keep people safe while allowing SHARE members to decide not to get vaccinated, such as frequent COVID testing. They told us that currently the hospital does not think that frequent testing is practical for large numbers of employees, nor is it enough protection against the spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19. We need to see what the executive order says about this. The negotiations continue.
The hospital has laid out more precautions for anyone who is unvaccinated as of November 1st.
The Staffing Crisis
The SHARE team raised the possibility of a COVID vaccine mandate causing employees to leave because they do not want to be vaccinated against COVID. Many areas are already short-staffed, and people are exhausted. SHARE members are afraid that unvaccinated co-workers will leave and they will have to work even shorter. In response, management representatives described work that the Talent Acquisition department is doing to hire new people, but acknowledged that a vaccine mandate could make the staffing problem worse. They said that senior management believes that protecting the patients through vaccination of caregivers is so important that they are willing to take the risk of losing employees by mandating the vaccine. And the executive order may mean that the hospital doesn’t have much choice – again, we shall see.
Work from Home Exemption from the Vaccine?
Some SHARE members who work from home have suggested they should have an exemption from the mandate, because they don’t come into physical contact with co-workers or patients so they cannot spread the disease. Management said that if work-from-home employees get COVID and can’t work, that has an impact on the hospital’s ability to provide services to patients – especially in another COVID surge and staff is stretched even thinner. Management thinks that the federal mandate will probably apply to all employees of employers that bill Medicare or Medicaid – regardless of whether the employees are on-site or remote. Again, we shall see.
More to Negotiate
The most frequent questions that SHARE leaders hear are:
Are the vaccines safe?
What happens if I don’t get vaccinated?
SHARE is compiling a list of questions from SHARE members about the safety of the COVID vaccines. We believe that the hospital should provide answers to people’s questions and concerns. We are working to set up ways to get members’ questions answered, in addition to the material already published on the Hub.
SHARE and UMass Memorial will continue to discuss what will happen to SHARE members who do not get vaccinated. As we have said, partly this depends on the details of the executive order. SHARE is advocating that the mandate deadlines be pushed back so that SHARE members and department can make better-informed decisions about the vaccine, exemptions, accommodations, and staffing, and so that we can continue to talk through issues such as cultural mistrust and structural racism.
We will continue to negotiate, and we will continue to keep you posted. We very much appreciate how many SHARE members have engaged in this difficult process, and how many of you have thoughtfully laid out your interests. If you have questions or concerns, including issues that you would like to see raised with management, please email us.