Municipal unions sue NYC over COVID vaccine mandate
The Big Apple’s major municipal unions went through with their threat to sue City Hall on Friday, challenging Mayor Bill de Blasio’s strict vaccine mandate for staffers at the Department of Education.
The legal challenge comes less than a month after Hizzoner tightened rules for DOE staffers, requiring all employees of the public school system to get vaccinated — and ending the option to opt out through weekly coronavirus testing.
The unions claim in their lawsuit that they “support vaccination and encourage all employees to vaccinate if they are able,” but argue de Blasio’s policy is “poorly-conceived” and “coercive,” especially to blue-collar city workers who can’t afford the loss of pay, benefits and pensions.
The rule, they argue, is an example of “the city’s ever-expanding emergency powers, purportedly justified by the continuing pandemic,” the filing states.
Staff at most other city agencies are still allowed opt out of the vaccine requirement, provided they get a weekly coronavirus swab and wear a mask at the office.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan Supreme Court by a slew of unions — including District 37, the United Federation of Teachers and Teamsters Local 237 — is the latest salvo from organized labor targeting the vaccine rules.
At a press conference Friday, UFT head Michael Mulgrew focused much of his ire on his fight with City Hall over vaccine exemptions.
“The main part that has to be challenged — and not allow a precedent to be set — is a local government trying to say they can remove people from payroll because of a vaccine mandate,” he said. “They’re willing to do the work, but they just need accommodations and the proper exemptions.”
It’s an example of the needle that local labor leaders are trying to thread with the mandates, as they argue they are in favor of vaccinating the city workforce against the coronavirus — but that requirement should be collectively bargained, a process that can take months as the pandemic is once again killing 1,500 people a day nationally.
In New York, de Blasio rolled out the requirements over the summer as officials grew visibly exasperated at the slow rate of vaccine uptake among key sections of the city workforce — and increasingly worried that the Delta variant outbreaks ripping through southern portions of the United States could cause another wave of the pandemic here.
The pattern seen here is playing out nationally as labor leaders pushed back against President Biden’s new vaccine mandate for the executive branch and private sector employers, which covers two-thirds of all US workers.
Larry Cosme, president of the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, issued a statement Thursday that blasted the mandate as unnecessary, overbearing and counterintuitive.
While the debate over how best to get Americans vaccinated rages on, there’s little doubt over the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines.
Nearly four-out-of-five adults in the five boroughs, 78.8 percent, have gotten at least one shot, so far, city data shows.
Full inoculation cuts the risk of getting the coronavirus by 80 percent — and the risk of hospitalization if infected by more than 90 percent, a recent study by the New York State Department of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found.
A Post analysis of CDC data also found that in 2021 so far 99 percent of hospitalizations for COVID have been among the unvaccinated.
The union lawsuit came the same day that de Blasio further expanded vaccine requirements in city schools, requiring students who participate in performing art extracurricular activities at high schools — like band, dance and cheer-leading — to get their shots.
The move expanded a requirement first imposed on students who play high school sports like football and basketball.
“We’re talking about performing arts where folks are close together, in close contact, lots of exhaling,” de Blasio said on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show. “This is, according to CDC and state guidance, where we need to focus.”
However, de Blasio acknowledged the new rule would not apply to students who take those corresponding arts and music classes during the school day.
“This is about extracurriculars only,” de Blasio said when asked if it would apply to classes too.
When pressed by the show’s host, Lehrer, about the similar risk, de Blasio responded “that’s something we’re obviously looking at.”
“The best way to address that issue to use every tool we have to get kids vaccinated.”
