On Thursday, United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby said that after the company announced an employee vaccine requirement allowing few exemptions, only a “a handful” of people have quit — out of over 84,000 employees.
Speaking on CNN of the company’s September 27 vaccination deadline, Kirby said that the resignations he knows of make up an exceedingly small portion of their workforce. “The [resignations] I’m aware of are in single digit numbers,” he said.
Kirby acknowledged that the company will likely see more resignations by the deadline, but that there will ultimately be a very low number. United Airlines implemented their vaccine mandate in early August, giving their employees until the end of October to be fully vaccinated, present a medical or religious exemption, or potentially face termination. That deadline was bumped up to this month after the Pfizer vaccine was given full approval by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in late August.
The low number of resignations lends credence to the idea that vaccine mandates are effective at ensuring that large swaths of people are inoculated against COVID-19.
The company announced this week that 90 percent of its workforce is vaccinated — and, of the remaining 10 percent, many have simply yet to upload their proof of vaccination. The company is also seeking to relocate unvaccinated customer-facing employees to less public jobs, or place those employees on unpaid leave, Kirby added.
Labor unions are split on vaccine mandates and occupational punishments that come with them; some unions like the American Federation of Teachers have encouraged their workers to get vaccinated, but are hesitant to support mandates that could cost workers their jobs. Public health experts say that mandates like the one that President Joe Biden handed down recently are necessary if the country is looking to end the pandemic.
A recent survey suggested that a vast majority of remaining unvaccinated people — currently about 24 percent of adults in the U.S. — would rather quit than get their shots, if they aren’t able to obtain an exemption. But the survey also posed a completely hypothetical question which, as The Washington Post noted, could plausibly have skewed the results.
The question “invites people to claim an attractive, principled stand that, in many cases, might not ultimately hold up. Most of the remaining unvaccinated have staked out this position and firmly declined to get vaccinated for the better part of a year,” wrote The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “If they’re suddenly asked whether they would submit to doing something they didn’t previously want to do, of course many of them are going to say they would fight it.”
In reality, the risk of losing one’s job in a time of great economic uncertainty may outweigh the supposed reward of avoiding the shot, especially when an increasing number of employers and even recreational services like bars and concert organizers are mandating COVID vaccination.
Moreover, data gathered over the past months has shown that, despite breakthrough cases, the vast majority of people who are dying and being hospitalized due to COVID are unvaccinated, meaning that getting vaccinated — for most, a relatively unobtrusive process — could prevent one’s own death.
More forceful messaging on vaccines from employers and the government also appears to be changing people’s minds about whether or not to get the shot. Recent polling from Axios/Ispos found that vaccine hesitancy is slowly dropping, with fewer adults than ever claiming that they won’t get vaccinated. Forty-three percent of the people now say that they would get the shot if their employers mandated vaccinations, versus only 33 percent saying the same last month.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.