NY Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

https://twitter.com/marinamedvin/status/1584930051166208000

by typeofhuman • 4 years ago

32 35 4 years ago

twitter.com

typeofhuman5• 4 years ago

Link to ruling, pdf:

https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/fbem/DocumentDisplayServlet...

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

Interestingly, this ruling holds the Health Commissioner can issue vaccine mandates. What they can't do is create employment conditions, prohibit employees from going to work or terminate employees.

Procedurally, the Health Commissioner could have created the mandate and then had the various departments go through their due process. (Though based on the vaccine being non-sterilizing, that mandate may not have held either.)

rogerkirkness• 4 years ago

Good. The Covid justice reckoning being unwound as expected.

typeofhuman5• 4 years ago

Slowly but surely.

The vaccine-free are due a well deserved apology (and compensation) for all the hate, torment, threats, and financial loss.

Edit: downvotes without comments, feels like Reddit in here.

chrsig• 4 years ago

The vaccine-free are due a well deserved apology (and compensation) for all the hate, torment, threats, and financial loss.

They deserve nothing.

sn0w_crash• 4 years ago

Do not expect any apologies.

These people believe they are not only much smarter than you, they also have a moral superiority that was handed down from a state-run deity.

ganoushoreilly2• 4 years ago

It's going to be interested to see how this impacts things like the national guard, whom are state employees. I expect lots of lawsuits in the coming years over mandated vaccination and the continued disclosures is going to make it worse. I fully suspect this is why the government agencies fought tooth and nail on releasing covid-19 vaccination test data.

I'm vaccinated, but it's very clear a lot of what was presented wasn't just incorrect but materially false. That should concern everyone.

samketchup• 4 years ago

Nice to finally see people coming around

LatteLazy6• 4 years ago

The logic in these rulings is very weak: being vaccinated does not 100% prevent infection/transmission in the same way that being sober doesn't not guarantee you won't crash your car, it doesn't make drunk driving ok, especially for an employee...

pexabit2• 4 years ago

It does not even discernibly prevent infection or transmission.

LatteLazy6• 4 years ago

Citation needed I think. Aside from mortality, those are the 2 main things you need from a vaccine...

janef04213• 4 years ago

When making these kinds of rulings, it is necessary to balance two competing interests; The benefits to public health of vaccination, and the harm of unemployment for the individual. Since the primary rationale of a workplace vaccine mandate would be to prevent workplace viral transmission, a vaccine having only a moderate effect on transmission would weaken the benefits. This makes it more likely that the harms of non-employment would outweigh the health benefits.

idiotsecant• 4 years ago

it is necessary to balance two competing interests; The benefits to public health of vaccination, and the harm of unemployment for the individual.

I'm not sure the harm to the employee due to being unemployed has ever been an issue when considering labor law in the past, why should this be different?

LatteLazy6• 4 years ago

I feel like this is still a weird decision:

The maximum harm from the mandate is a person losing their job, and in most states (inc NY) that's a harm any employer can inflict for almost any reason or no reason at all.

The maximum harm from no mandate is that many people get infected by that individual who otherwise would not have, they infect others on an exponential basis, and people die.

To me, that's a pretty easy harm vs harm decision. I wonder what the same court would do with a surgeon who likes a drink before operating and refused to do stop. Presumably his right to a job would outweigh his patient's right to an X% lower chance of dying?!

I know it can't be that crazy. I must be missing some killer legal principle here (other than "fuck society"). And it's not the court's job but it would be very very helpful if they'd explain their reasoning a bit better. The ruling mostly reads like a mix of the argument from the winning side repeated and snippets from the losing side proceeded by "the court does not agree that" etc.

C'est la vie I guess. Thanks for your comment :)

rasz• 4 years ago

Afaik the facts are covid vaccines dont prevent transmission _at all_.

ben_w3• 4 years ago

This is incorrect. At least some vaccines have at least some effect on transmission while infected. What I saw was not amazing, but it was not nothing.

tssva• 4 years ago

The NY Supreme Court is not the highest court in NY. The NY Supreme Court is comprised of 62 local courts and this ruling came from one of them. The city is appealing this decision and it will next go to an Appellate Division court and after that can go to the Court of Appeals which is the court of last resort in New York.

codefreeordie2• 4 years ago

I always find it weird that in some states the "Supreme" court is the lowest court. Why did some states (like NY) name their courts this silly way?

czinck• 4 years ago

It's called "Supreme" because it can hear trials about anything, as opposed to things like traffic court. Definitely confusing, but it's also significantly older than the US Constitution, so I can't fault whoever named it too much.

eappleby• 4 years ago

In the end, both sides got what was probably best for them. Many people felt unsafe being around people that were unvaccinated during an especially dangerous time and the mandate helped to provide some protection for them. The people that were unvaccinated had to go through a lot of hardship, but this ruling basically provides them a retro-active free time off. If you went back in time, this probably would have been the best option, even though both sides would have likely objected to it.

puffoflogic• 4 years ago

but this ruling basically provides them a retro-active free time off

That is dehumanizing BS. No compassionate human being could possibly hold this view.

Going through the stress and humiliation of being fired for what turned out to be the wiser medical choice, and generally being unable to find a job for the same reason in a very uncertain economy, is not a vacation.

ben_w3• 4 years ago

Avoidance was not (with very few exceptions) a wiser medical choice.

If the effect on transmission had been zero (it wasn't zero, but it was lower than anyone would have liked), then it would absolutely have been their (unwise) choice to make. But it wasn't zero.

24% reduction in further transmission from the first dose of some of the vaccines, more powerful with more doses, less powerful with time. I'm not sure what threshold I'd use for making it mandatory in general, though I would still have a different threshold for doctors and nurses — even in an alternate reality where the available vaccines had zero effect on transmission while infected and the vaccines has been weaker and had more side effects, the healthcare systems in many nations were severely impacted and needed as many people as possible able to work.

NY Supreme Court reinstates all fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

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