The Amentum-led prime at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee told a federal appeals’ court this week its COVID-19 vaccination mandate fulfilled a contractual obligation to take “reasonable precautions” to protect worker health.
UCOR’s contract with DOE, awarded in July 2010, required the Amentum-Jacobs joint venture to “take all reasonable precautions to protect the environment, health, and safety of its employees, DOE personnel, and members of the public,” according to the brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
As a result, UCOR is asking the appeals court to throw out a wrongful termination case brought by a former employee. UCOR is the name of both the current and immediate-past Oak Ridge cleanup prime.
Though the first UCOR’s contract was signed about a decade before the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, it was still reasonable to require vaccination for most of the company’s 2,000 employees, the contractor said.
UCOR is being sued by Yolonda Riggs, a radiation technician fired in January 2022 after refusing vaccination, citing religious beliefs.
But UCOR said in a brief this week the vaccine policy was just a reasonable effort to ensure employee health, as required by its government contract, it has derivative sovereign immunity.
The contractor said there were many actions by President Joe Biden and the executive branch to encourage widespread vaccination against the sickness that killed more than one million Americans. Biden issued executive orders, and a federal task force then drafted government standards, pressing to get most federal workers and government contractor employees vaccinated.
In the same brief, UCOR attorneys argued that DOE’s contract did not require UCOR to comply with the Tennessee COVID-19 statute, shielding workers from disclosing their vaccination status. This is because the Tennessee law “is not an environmental, health, or safety regulation.” The explicit purpose was to “safeguard liberty,” UCOR said in the brief.
There are multiple live lawsuits related to COVID-19 mandates at the Oak Ridge site.
