Coronavirus Update 1-27-2021: Tread carefully if offering employees financial incentives to get the COVID-19 vaccine

To a nation waiting for action, let me be clearest on this point: Help is on the way. 

Those were the words of President Biden in announcing the ordering of 200 million additional COVID-19 vaccine doses, a hike in the distribution of doses to states, and a promise that there will be enough doses to fully vaccinate 300 million Americans by the end of summer. It's an ambitious plan, but it's what we need to end a pandemic that has already claimed the lives of more than 425,000 Americans and will claim hundreds of thousands more before we close the book on Covid.

Vaccines, however, only work if people actually accept syringes in their arms. Too many of us say that they won't. 

The 3rd nominee for the “Worst Employer of 2021” is … the pregnant pauser

Pregnancy discrimination has been illegal for at least 43 years. You'd think employers would know better. You'd also lose a lot of bets if you bet against the ignorance of some employers. 

Meet Awon Phie LLC, which operates a Holiday Inn Express in Corpus Chrisi, Texas, our third nominee for the "Worst Employer of 2021." How did it earn its nomination? According to a lawsuit the EEOC filed against it, three weeks after hiring an employee to work as a housekeeper, the company's operations manager, noticing her stomach, told her she was a "liability" because of her pregnancy, that she couldn't employ a pregnant woman, and fired her.

Coronavirus Update 1-25-2021: President Biden calls for unemployment benefits to employees who refuse to work because of Covid

Late last week, President Biden signaled that part of his overall plan to provide economic relief for American families and businesses amid the COVID-19 crisis is to broaden the availability of unemployment benefits to employees who quit their jobs related to Covid.

Specifically, the president is "asking the U.S. Department of Labor to consider clarifying that workers who refuse unsafe working conditions can still receive unemployment insurance." 

Civil rights is not a pizza

Among the litany of executive orders President Biden issued in his first two days in office was one on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation. It's a beautiful statement adopting as the policy of the federal government the Supreme Court's decision in Bostock that Title VII's definition of sex explicitly includes LGBTQ employees.

Instead of reading my thoughts, today I offer you two options to listen to them

One of the great benefits of this blog is the opportunities it has opened for me to network with others. One of the great benefits of that networking is the ability to sometimes have my voice heard on other platforms. Today, I offer for your listening pleasure two podcasts on which I've recently appeared, the HR Social Hour Half Hour Podcast, and the Tech Leader's Toolbox Podcast.

Inauguration Day

Today is a wonderful day.

28 years ago, January 20, 1993, I was on the National Mall experiencing the inauguration of Bill Clinton. One of my absolute best memories. I treasure the day I spent as part of history.

Democrat or Republican, left or right, liberal or conservative, it’s a day that we should ALL come together to celebrate our nation and our glorious democracy.

So even if you disagree with the person placing his hand on the Bible and swearing the oath of office, please celebrate all that it symbolizes.

At noon, I’ll be pausing my work day and moving to my family-room couch to watch history.

How will you spend Inauguration Day? Drop a comment below and let me know.

* Pic by whitehouse.gov, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What employers can expect from Biden’s presidency: A temporary emergency OSHA standard for COVID-19

Today marks the one-year anniversary of the identification of the first COVID-19 case in the United States. On January 20, 2020, the State of Washington and the CDC confirmed that someone in Washington State had contracted the virus. Since then, 24,809,840 additional Americans have contracted Covid, and 411,520 have died from it. 

All the while, OSHA, the federal agency charged with protecting health and safety in the workplace, has done very little to address the pandemic, and we still lack a national safety standard on keeping Covid-safe at work.

President Biden's OSHA will fix this glaring omission. He has called on Congress "to authorize the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to issue a COVID-19 Protection Standard that covers a broad set of workers."