1,400 NYC Workers Fired Over COVID Vaccine Mandate

Feb. 15, 2022

New York City fired 1,430 metropolis employees for failing to adjust to town authorities’s vaccine mandate.

Mayor Eric Adams stated termination notices had been despatched Friday to the employees, most of whom had been on unpaid go away for months, The New York Times reported. Of the fired workers, about 900 labored for town Department of Education, 100 for town Housing Authority, and 36 with the police division.

Adams stated that about 95% of town’s 370,000 employees acquired at the very least one dose of vaccine by the Friday deadline, up from 84% when then-Mayor Bill de Blasio introduced the mandate final October, The Times stated. The newspaper reported that about 9,000 different employees are nonetheless unvaccinated and in search of exemptions.

“Our goal was always to vaccinate, not terminate, and city workers stepped up and met the goal placed before them,” Adams stated in a press release issued Monday.

The employees had confronted a Friday deadline to obtain a primary dose of vaccine except they had been newly employed. New hires had been purported to have gotten two pictures of a two-dose vaccine by Friday or one shot of a one-dose vaccine. Only two new hires had been among the many group receiving termination notices.

The variety of workers dealing with termination shrank in current days. Before Friday, the vaccine deadline, about 4,000 employees nonetheless wanted to get vaccinated, The Times stated.

City worker unions complained concerning the terminations.

“Workers should not get fired. There are a lot of people who don’t believe in putting this stuff in their bodies,” Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, and head of the Municipal Labor Council, advised The New York Post.

The Times stated the motion was in all probability the biggest mass termination of municipal workers due to a COVID vaccine mandate.