Employers are lifting COVID-19 vaccination requirements and employees sent home for refusing to get vaccinated are flooding back. We asked experts how we should deal with what already looks like a messy situation.
But a safeguard from the virus, of course, wasn’t a safeguard from internal backlash.
But within months of the dispute’s settlement, and as COVID-19 cases began declining in Ontario in March, the company lifted its vaccine mandate and began askingThat awkward scenario — workers and bosses fighting over COVID-19 mandates, only to come face to face at the office a few months later — is now playing out in workplaces across the country.
Between March and June, several major white-collar firms dropped their mandates in quick succession — Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Canada’s Big Five banks included — and began asking workers back, at least part-time. In reality, it won’t be easy. More than 40 per cent of Canadian workers started working remotely at the outset of the pandemic, largely in white-collar professions. Two years later, that figure has shrunk to 20 per cent.
Unvaccinated people have a much greater chance of being asymptomatic while infected with the virus, raising the likelihood of bringing COVID-19 into the office without knowing they’re sick, Furness said. While most workplaces say their staff are fully vaccinated — Scotiabank, for instance, boasts a 94 per cent vaccination rate among employees — big employers with sprawling workforces may still have hundreds of unvaccinated workers on their payrolls, waiting for their suspensions to end.
Between November 2021 and January, Canadian labour arbitrators heard grievances from dozens of local union branches. Several of the major labour associations — including the Teamsters, the United Food and Commercial Workers and the Power Workers Union — went to bat for their suspended members. These workers argue that their suspensions were “unilateral” and breached the terms of their contracts, said Jon Pincus, an employment lawyer and partner at Samfiru Tumarkin LLP.