Marta Lavandier/AP Photo
Kareen Troitino, a local corrections officer union president, stands outside the Federal Corrections Institution in Miami, March 12, 2021. Many of the facility’s 240 employees had expressed concerns about getting a COVID vaccine.
The decision of President Biden and various governors and mayors to require governmental employees to get vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to regular COVID testing has left American unions befuddled.
On one hand, AFL-CIO President Rich Trumka has said he favors the mask mandates, responding to a questioner on C-SPAN by saying, “If you come back and you’re not vaccinated, everybody in that workplace is jeopardized.” And while a number of unions have lodged objections to the mandates unless they emerge from a union-management negotiation, the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, which represents 25,000 workers at the Defense Department and NASA, has embraced them. I guess that’s what happens when a majority of your members actually understands and respects science.
Would that were the case across the larger workforce. A slew of police and security unions have objected to the vaccine-or-testing mandates. President Biden’s new order has met with objections from the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association, whose president has predicted “a lot of pushback; it’s going to be an avalanche” from members at the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s similar mandate has received cries of outrage from the city’s unions of firefighters and paramedics. However, the city’s largest municipal union, AFSCME District Council 37, has met with de Blasio’s office and, The New York Times reports, may be satisfied that its voice has been heard and the mandate can go ahead.
Other left-leaning public-sector unions, including the Postal Workers and the American Federation of Teachers, have also said they need to consult with the relevant governmental officials to craft a plan acceptable to their members. Endeavoring to balance the concerns of her largely vaccinated members with those of her vaccine-resistant members, and her union’s concern to stop the pandemic (and open schools) with her union’s duty to oppose imposed mandates, AFT President Randi Weingarten said, “We believe strongly that everyone should get vaccinated unless they have a medical or religious exception, and that this should be a mandatory subject of negotiation for employers to keep their employees safe and build trust.”
Given their disproportionately right-wing tilt, members of policing unions have some of the lowest rates of vaccination. The NYPD has administered vaccines—for free—to just 43 percent of New York’s finest, while the rate for the city’s jailers is a bare 33 percent. Even more disturbing is the resistance from paramedics. Nothing like riding in an ambulance with an unvaccinated med tech trying to resuscitate you.
The problem underlying these unions’ position is that they have conflicting mandates. One is to ensure their members’ rights are not circumvented by dictates from on high. The other—which some unions, apparently, don’t seem to realize is literally lifesaving as the ultra-infectious delta variant rips through the land—is the old labor adage that an injury to one is an injury to all. Don’t call Joe Biden or Gavin Newsom or Bill de Blasio anti-union because he clings to that latter credo.
