Public-sector employers in Vermont are expected to be subject to President Biden’s mandate that firms with 100 or more workers require their employees to get the Covid-19 vaccine or be tested on a weekly basis.
The president announced last week that he would direct the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to adopt an emergency rule putting such a mandate in place. The rule would apply to private employers nationwide, but 26 states also have prior agreements with the federal government that requires them to adopt and enforce all federal OSHA standards, including in public workplaces.
Vermont is one of those states. The Department of Labor confirmed Friday that this means public-sector employees in the Green Mountain State would fall under the president’s vaccination mandate, but officials stressed they would not know the full scope of the rule’s impact until they actually saw its text.
“We’re still awaiting guidance,” said Kyle Thweatt, a spokesperson for the Department of Labor.
Since the federal government has yet to issue its rule, it’s unknown at this point when it would take effect.
Public K-12 workers can have three types of employers: school districts; supervisory districts; and supervisory unions, which serve as umbrella organizations for smaller districts. The Vermont Agency of Education said Friday it estimates that 60 of 154 such entities will be subject to the new federal rules.
That still leaves plenty of public school employers that will need to decide locally whether to require educators to vaccinate. But Jeff Francis, the executive director of the Vermont Superintendents Association, said he thinks having an initial critical mass of school districts putting in place mandates should make it easier for others to follow suit.
“Hopefully, if we move as a state system in that direction, it will help every employer because more and more will be following that directive,” he said.
The Vermont-National Education Association, the state teachers union, has said it would support any requirement to vaccinate school employees, although it has said implementation of such mandates would need to be bargained at the local level.
The public-sector mandate would also presumably extend to the University of Vermont as well as the Vermont State College System, both which had already announced vaccine mandates for students but not staff or faculty. Katherine Levasseur, a spokesperson for the state colleges, said the system still needed to see guidance from the Vermont Occupational Safety and Health Administration to know for sure. The state college system, which is separate from UVM, employs about 2,300 workers.
Some 112,000 private-sector workers at large firms in Vermont could be subject to the federal vaccine mandate, according to the Vermont Department of Labor. That’s about 44% of the private workforce.
Nearly 7,000 federal employees residing in Vermont are also covered by the president’s mandate, VTDigger reported last week. All state executive branch workers, meanwhile, fell under a vaccine mandate put in place by the governor starting Sept. 15.
