United Kingdom: Jurists warn companies against vaccine discrimination
Country you go, customs you find, often opposite. As the Financial Times in the UK points out, employers have been warned by legal counsel that requiring staff to be vaccinated against Covid could pose serious legal problems, all while offices fill up again after restrictions on the pandemic have been relaxed.
About 89 per cent of Brits aged 16 and over have received at least one dose of the Covid vaccine, but this is a widespread variation based on age. In England, where a distribution by age is available, more than a third of 20-year-olds and more than a quarter of 30-year-olds are not vaccinated, while 90% of those over 60 are vaccinated.
"An official government survey also found that 4% of British adults were reluctant to take the vaccine, but it rose to 21% among blacks and 14% among people who identify as Muslims."
A survey of 500 UK executives by the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills found that 70% of them were concerned about the potential risks of discrimination against staff based on vaccination status. It is clear that precisely the complex mixture of a lack of love for vaccination with issues of a racial and religious nature makes an obligation or a job selection based on vaccination all the more dangerous from the point of view of labor law.
“Employers are in a very delicate balance between respecting everyone's right to choose whether or not to receive the vaccine and the safety of all staff,” said Emma Röhsler, partner of the law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. “They must respect the rights of those who do not want to be vaccinated, also protecting those who have chosen to be vaccinated. so no suspension or dismissal for the no-vax. Marie Walsh, labor lawyer and founder of UK-based Consilia Legal, says proof of vaccination at work can be legal, as long as employers determine why the data is being collected and can justify how this information will be processed. “If you can't prove it's reasonable management instruction to ask employees to be vaccinated, you can't insist that they give you this information,” says Walsh.
Given the completely opposite view, in Italy of Confindustria and Trade Unions it would be interesting to know which of the two parties actually protects workers and which does not. It would be useful to ask the workers themselves, but we doubt that the unions will do it: they may find that they no longer protect anyone.
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The article United Kingdom: jurists warn companies against vaccine discrimination comes from ScenariEconomici.it .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/regno-unito-i-giuristi-mettono-in-guardia-le-aziende-dalla-discriminazione-vaccinale/ on Wed, 22 Sep 2021 15:01:08 +0000.