Balch & Bingham's Doug Kauffman, a partner and member of the firm's Labor & Employment Practice, recently spoke to Bloomberg Law regarding President Biden’s announcement of OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard which will mandate employers with 100 or more employees to require employees to be vaccinated or tested weekly. The standard will also call for workers to get paid time off so that they can get vaccinated and recover from any ill effects from doing so.
In the article, Doug details what steps employers will need to do to comply by first getting a handle on which employees are unvaccinated and decide if they will require those workers to vaccinate or test regularly.
“Surveying employees and having them attest to the truthfulness of their vaccination status will likely be a compliance strategy for the emergency rule,” said Doug. “As an employer, if I had a survey for workers, make sure there’s an attestation component in it, and maybe if someone doesn’t respond to the survey, assume they’re not vaccinated.”
Companies that impose vaccine mandates will have to comply with other legal requirements, such as accommodations for disabilities or religious objections.
At Balch, Doug counsels organizations on how to manage their most valuable assets: their employers. He has counseled large and small employers for over 20 years by helping them stay up to date on the law, regulations and best practices with respect to employment compliance. He also handles complaints or audits by various government agencies, such as the EEOC, the Department of Labor, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he litigates all employment issues in court.
