I’ll bet nowhere on your HR job description is there anything about serving as the religion police. But during the pandemic, some companies were pretty persnickety when considering employee requests for accommodations from getting a COVID-19 vaccine. Companies that applied heightened scrutiny did so at their own risk. In its…
Although the vast majority of businesses implemented a written COVID-19 policy at one time or another, many have eliminated or stopped updating those policies. That’s what I learned from a poll I posted on Friday using SurveyMonkey, to which 227 people responded. However, in full disclosure, I didn’t realize at…
The other day, a partner asked me about COVID-19 policies and how clients may still implement them. Candidly, it wasn’t something I’d thought about for a while. Heck, I had to dust one off to remember all of the minutiae about vaccines, CDC guidelines, etc. There are a few states…
In what it describes as “streamline[d] COVID-19 guidance,” the latest COVID-19 updates (here and here) from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention don’t appear to distinguish between individuals regardless of vaccination status. Potayto, potahto. While the CDC continues to promote the importance of being up to date with vaccination,…
On Friday, attorneys for over 500 current and former healthcare workers at a Midwest healthcare system announced that they had settled “the nation’s first classwide lawsuit” for employees alleging that they were unlawfully discriminated against and denied religious exemptions from a COVID shot mandate. You can view a copy of…
Days since I’ve blogged about COVID-19 = 78 0. I promise(ish), this one will be interesting. And for those of you with businesses that had a mass layoff or plant closing because of COVID-19, it will be horrifying. You see, I just got finished reading a Fifth Circuit decision in…
On April 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that its Mask Order (requiring face masks on planes into and within the United States) would continue to allow the CDC time to assess the potential impact of the rise of COVID-19 cases. Yesterday, however, a Florida federal…
You can take the boy of the ’90s, but… It’s been a minute — actually, about a month and a half — since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated its COVID-19 mask guidance. The last update essentially guided most people to wear a mask based on personal…
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool to help determine how long employees need to isolate, quarantine, or take other steps to prevent spreading COVID-19? Late last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) unveiled this Quarantine and Isolation Calculator to help people know what to do…
I’ll admit it. I was wrong. All those times that I joked about California being the “New Jersey of the West” when it comes to employment law. And when I said that New York City or Virginia or some other state or locality was becoming the people’s champ. I was…