Six weeks after telling unvaccinated feds and contractors to wear masks and be tested regularly for COVID-19, President Joe Biden Thursday took things a step further and said such workers must either take the vaccine or find another job.
“If you want to work with the federal government, do business with us, get vaccinated,” Biden said during a half-hour speech.
The president attributed much of the current surge in the so-called Delta variant to the nearly 80 million Americans, roughly 25% of the population, yet to take a single dose of the vaccine. “That 25% can cause a lot of damage and they are,” Biden said.
An executive order titled “Ensuring Adequate COVID Safety Protocols for Federal Contractors,” was issued shortly after the speech. The order says new safeguards “will decrease the spread of COVID-19, which will decrease worker absence, reduce labor costs, and improve the efficiency of contractors and subcontractors at sites where they are performing work for the Federal Government.”
The official language says contractors and subcontractors will “for the duration of the contract, comply with all guidance for contractor or subcontractor workplace locations published by the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force.” The task force will roll out its new COVID-19 guidance by Sept. 24 and the order appears to say it will also apply to most new federal contracts and subcontracts starting in October.
With fewer than 24 hours to digest the President’s order at deadline Friday for Weapons Complex Monitor, the Department of Energy Office of Environmental Management declined to comment about the order’s requirements.
A spokesperson for the office of Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm declined to comment about when existing DOE site management contracts would be modified to include a new clause binding contractors to follow the COVID task force’s impending guidelines. The new clause would automatically be required for any existing contracts that are extended or renewed, including through the exercise of options.
Similarly, the parent companies of big DOE contractors planned to keep quiet until the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force published new guidelines.
“We are still assessing and evaluating the details of this new mandate to determine how we can help our unvaccinated employees meet this requirement as efficiently as possible,” Huntington Ingalls Industries President and CEO Mike Petters said in a statement. “The two priorities that will guide our response are keeping our employees safe and supporting our customers.”
“We have yet to see specific guidance requiring government contractors to be vaccinated against COVID 19,” said Huntington Ingalls spokeswoman Beci Brenton in an email response to a Weapons Complex Monitor inquiry.
“The safety, security and health of our workers is always Fluor’s number one priority,” that company said in a Friday statement issued through a spokesman. “We are following the COVID-19 situation closely and each of our project sites is following the direction of the U.S. government to ensure the safety of the entire workforce.
A BWX Technologies spokesman, Jud Simmons, said the company has “strongly encouraged” employees to get vaccinated and opened clinics at some worksites. “We are reviewing the President’s plan, and once we receive further, detailed guidance from the government, we will fully comply with the directives that apply to us as a U.S. government contractor and/or employer of more than 100 people.”
“We have sent a clear message to our employees that getting vaccinated is strongly encouraged,” said Leidos spokeswoman Alyssa Pettus. “We believe recent announcements from the administration dovetail with our ongoing efforts.”
“Navarro will work site-specific requirements,” Navarro Research and Engineering said in an email response to an inquiry. “However the recent Biden mandate makes it a contractual requirement.”
President Biden’s move toward mandating inoculation at federal workplaces is hardly a surprise given the increasingly hardened tone from the White House recently.
“We have been patient but our patience is wearing thin,” Biden said. He also said businesses employing 100 people or more must soon have any unvaccinated workers tested on a regular basis.
Some sources around the DOE weapons complex said this week they think legal challenges from vaccine hesitant workers are assured. However, there were no reports of any suits being filed as of Thursday.
One labor leader at the Portsmouth Site in Ohio, said Wednesday before the Biden announcement, he was encountering much trepidation even in enactment of the recent DOE program to have workers declare their vaccination status.
There are still “a lot of people that still have fear with the vaccine,” Herman Potter, president of United Steelworkers Local 689 at Portsmouth. “They are not confident in the program,” of inoculation, he said. People hold varying opinions and that makes the situation tricky, Potter said.
“I expect there will be opposition, and maybe some resignations,” said Tom Carpenter, executive director of the Hanford Challenge advocacy group in Washington state, which monitors DOE’s Hanford site. “But realistically …. [t]hese are good-paying jobs with good benefits. It will be a tough decision for some. Having said that, the COVID situation in the Tri-Cities is dire,” Carpenter said Thursday in an email.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) tweeted his support of Biden’s action, saying it was a decisive move “that will save lives …The more people that get vaccinated, the sooner this will be over.”
By contrast, Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said in a press release that Biden is mishandling the pandemic.
“[T]he government should not be mandating vaccines for private companies,” Wilson said. “Private companies should be able to make this decision for themselves.” Waivers for medical and religious reasons should be allowed, the South Carolina lawmaker said.
Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.), tweeted that “President Biden’s vaccine edict is simply anti-American … Government should never be in the business of dictating how private industry operates.”
Weapons Complex Sites Already Inching Toward Mandates
Before Thursday’s White House announcement, a trio of major DOE joint ventures had already announced that they would require all employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. Also on Thursday, major DOE contractor Bechtel, said it was ordering vaccinations or testing for staff at all corporate offices in the United States.
Effective Oct. 15, all non-union Bechtel employees in permanent offices and applicable project sites will have to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or have a negative COVID-19 test within the prior seven days, the company said in a statement.
UCOR, the Amentum-Jacobs joint venture in charge of remediating the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee said Tuesday it will make vaccination against COVID-19 a condition of employment for its 2,000 workers.
UCOR joined contractors at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
Employees for the Oak Ridge contractor have until Nov. 1 to receive their final shot, UCOR President and CEO Ken Rueter said in an announcement emailed to Weapons Complex Monitor.
“[O]ur leadership team decided that with the surge in cases in the community and among the workforce due to the virus variants, taking this proactive step is the best way to keep our workforce safe,” Rueter said in the statement.
More than 70% of the UCOR workforce is already vaccinated, said a spokesperson for the contractor who added Tuesday that plans for the mandate were shared with employees Aug. 26.
The contractor will consider exemptions for disability/medical reasons or religious reasons on a case-by-case basis, according to UCOR.
Triad National Security, which operates Los Alamos for the National Nuclear Security Administration, has given its staff until Oct. 15 to be fully inoculated. Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the manager of the Savannah River Site, has not set a deadline yet.
DOE, like other agencies, was already in the process of having federal employees and contract workers formally declare their vaccination status and face testing and travel restrictions if they could not prove they were fully vaccinated. The agency has urged its contractors to pull out all the stops to combat COVID-19, including vaccine mandates.
Of course, vaccine mandates at hospitals, schools and elsewhere have drawn pushback, and Tuesday Rep. Jeff Duncan (R-S.C.) voiced his opposition to the Savannah River contractor’s mandate via Twitter . “I am not anti-vaccine, but I am anti-vaccine mandate,” Duncan said. “A forced vaccine is an infringement of liberty/medical privacy & should never be a condition for employment.”
Duncan said in a letter to SRNS that other than Pfizer, other U.S. vaccines are still authorized for emergency use only.
Similarly, a group called New Mexico Freedoms Alliance held a protest Tuesday at Los Alamos National Laboratory. It could not immediately be reached for comment on any plans for a legal challenge.
At deadline Friday, the U.S. has experienced more than 40.5 million cases of COVID-19 and 654,000 deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
