A member of the South Carolina legislature from Aiken, Rep. Melissa Oremus, (R), urged Gov. Henry McMaster (R) to help stop planned firings of holdouts who refuse to get vaccinated against COVID-19 at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Fluor-led management contractor at the federal complex along the Georgia line, has called for vaccine refusers to turn in their access badges by tomorrow in anticipation of formal termination by the end of next month.
“We need you to act and we need you to act fast,” Oremus wrote in a Wednesday letter to the governor that she posted online.
Oremus requests McMaster follow the lead of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) who this week issued an executive order seeking to block employers in the state from enforcing vaccinate mandates. The Texas order said employees should not be fired for refusing the vaccine “for any reason of personal conscience” including religious beliefs and medical reasons, including prior recovery from COVID-19, the South Carolina lawmaker said. The Texas order also accuses the administration of President Joe Biden of “overreach” through issuance of federal employer vaccine mandates.
Identifying herself as a small business owner, Oremus said she would “never require my employees to put something in their bodies that they did not want to.”
Pointing to the thousands of workers, mostly contractors at DOE’s Savannah River Site, Oremus said: “These same employees worked through the pandemic when no vaccine existed, and now they are made out to be second-class citizens.”
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions employees, even after turning in their badges this week, could still change their minds and retain their jobs by getting their final shots by Nov. 16, a date that would provide the full measure of COVID-19 immunity by Nov. 30, the point when unvaccinated employees without exemptions are formally terminated, the company has said.
Savannah River Nuclear Solutions is one of three DOE contractors to announce employee mandates prior to the Biden administration’s guidance calling for inoculation of contractor employees by Dec. 8. The others are Triad National Security, manager of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and UCOR, lead cleanup contractor for the DOE Office of Environmental Management at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee.
