On September 9th President Joe Biden made the announcement that all employers with more than 100 employees would be required to enforce a worker vaccine mandate.
At the same time Biden announced all federal workers must be vaccinated and issued and updated executive order. Biden also expanded the federal requirements for contractors, Executive Order Here.
♦ The federal worker requirement has a date for guidance to execute the order listed as Sept. 16th: “The Task Force shall issue guidance within 7 days of the date of this order on agency implementation of this requirement for all agencies covered by this order” {Section 2.0 link}. The XO is very vague and generic on the issue of guidance.
♦ The due date for guidance for the contractor order is September 24th: “By September 24, 2021, the Safer Federal Workforce Task Force (Task Force) shall, as part of its issuance of Task Force Guidance, provide definitions of relevant terms for contractors and subcontractors, explanations of protocols required of contractors and subcontractors to comply with workplace safety guidance {Section 2.0(b) link} However, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has to review the Task Force guidance for feasibility and then approve the guidance.
So there are three elements: (1) Federal worker mandate; (2) Federal contractor mandate; and the big controversial one, (3) a national worker mandate for companies with over 100 employees.
Focusing on #3, the big one. The only material from the White House on the BIG CONTROVERSIAL national worker mandate is a small paragraph on the WH COVID PLAN section:
(link)
… That’s it folks. Almost a week later, and that’s the sum total of everything about the biggest economic and workforce disruption in the history of the nation. That one paragraph posted on September 10th.
Why is this important?
Well, the U.S. Department of Labor website has ZERO mentions of this national mandate. ZERO, nothing… nada, zilch. [SEE HERE]
Looking at the OSHA COVID information portal, used by employers and legal execs, will show you the exact same result. Nothing. [SEE HERE]
Notice there’s no date for DoL or OSHA delivery of any employer guidance or details. Nothing.
Think about this. This is the largest nationwide change to employment eligibility requirement in U.S. history….. Nothing else is even close… and yet if you didn’t watch the Biden announcement or read the media discussion about the Biden announcement, you wouldn’t be able to find a single detail about it – anywhere.
This is not normal; not even close to normal… even for the federal government.
If there was a federal intent to actually force American workers to get forcibly vaccinated as a condition of employment, there would be daily updates from a massive inter-agency network of compliance offices, regulatory agencies and private sector business interests giving updates and briefings… And yes, that pertains only to the anticipated guidance part, not to the actual setting of a deadline and working through the implementation phase of the national mandate.
I’m only talking about the basic guidance aspect. The labor discussions with internal and external customers of the DoL, OSHA, etc. to set a calendar for how to implement “guidance”, just that part. There’s nothing.
The absence of even a scintilla of material to indicate the White House or any federal agency is organizing an action plan of how to structure the guidance itself, is telling. The silence of the machine tells us it is not turned on. The bureaucracy has not been triggered. The machinery of the federal government has not been instructed to begin any process to execute on the instruction that OSHA will “develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated.” Nothing.
The silence is deafening.
It sure does seem like they have no intention of ever even triggering the process to get OSHA to begin evaluating how they could even begin to pull this off…. and again, for emphasis, I’m only talking about the tiny step of delivering initial guidance to employers that would indicate to them that OSHA was developing a rule.
There’s no deadline for OSHA to generate the guidance – and there’s certainly no deadline for the OSHA rule itself, which will come as an outcome of that initial guidance part.
Some have speculated that Joe Biden’s big White House announcement was nothing more than a distraction. There’s no way for them to ever get over the hurdles that would come from immediate employer backlash on the federal mandate; and they have no intent on even trying. Meaning it was all a big distraction -never intended execute- and always intended to clear the national conversation of all Biden-centric controversies and reset the administration. I’m starting to think that speculation is exactly correct.
If 80 million Americans are unvaxxed, and even if only a quarter of those are Main Street employed, the entire social and economic system would grind to a halt if 20 million heavily productive people quit working for 100+ employee companies and went to work much smaller operations. Remember, this is the workforce that was called “essential workers” last year. They were essential for a reason.
A grocery chain cannot lose 20 essential people per store, + warehouse and distribution, and still function. A WalMart cannot lose 50 essential workers per store, + warehouse and distribution, and still function. A hospital or hotel cannot lose 20 to 50 essential workers per operation and still function.
Ford? GM? Auto-workers in general? Labor Unions? AFSCME? SEIU? Police, Fire, Emergency First Responders? I cannot see a reasonable scenario where the national worker vaccination mandate is even feasible with an eligible 80+ million unvaccinated holding out.
I would not be surprised to see nothing more ever said about this “National Employment Vaccine Mandate.”
Prompted to 18:30
