I refuse to do business with any enterprise that mandates the covid vaccine for its employees.
I refuse to be part of any sort of coercive scheme that holds a family’s livelihood hostage in order to take away a worker’s right to make her own healthcare decisions.
I won’t be partner to that.
And I don’t trust that a business which so disrespects its employees is going to have any respect for its customers.
So I’m keeping my money and my patronage where they respect human dignity and freedom, and where they respect their employees’ right to decide what to or what not to put in their bodies. If businesses want to be dictators, they can do it without my help.
This comes on the heels of passionate calls by Joe Biden and Andrew Cuomo, the most popular national Democrats of 2020, for businesses to mandate the covid vaccine for their employees, and sometimes even for their customers. Biden wants people fired if they don’t get vaccinated, and Cuomo wants them denied service.
Biden, in the middle of the worst stretch of American presidential incompetence in generations, gleefully called yesterday for companies, hospitals, schools and governments to make the newly approved covid vaccine mandatory, a requirement for employment. That means, obviously, that those employees or job seekers who choose not to be vaccinated would be shut out of the job market.
Moms and dads would lose jobs, incomes would be lost, careers would be destroyed.
Because Joe Biden said so, and a heartless boss went along.
A heartless boss, and a foolish boss.
Because in the midst of a national labor shortage caused by Democrat stimmy checks and plush “emergency” unemployment benefits that pay people more for not working than they would get for working, it would have to be a pretty foolish company to send a quarter to a third of its employees out the door with few prospects of being able to replace them with new hires.
With labor costs already at near-record highs, would it be smart for American business to blackball unvaccinated workers and reduce the labor pool even more?
Did Joe Biden think about that?
(Sorry, cheap shot. As Afghanistan shows us, Joe Biden doesn’t – or can’t – think about anything.)
And even if he didn’t, smart enterprises will. When you can’t staff your hospital, restaurant or grocery store, being the government’s vaccine enforcer loses some of its luster.
Especially when the vaccine turns out to be something less than what was promised.
When many jurisdictions are reporting that 40 to 50 percent of new covid cases are among vaccinated people, and studies show that vaccination does nothing to reduce likelihood of transmission from infected individuals, and intensive care units are increasingly seeing vaccinated people among their patients, the argument for vaccination gets weaker and weaker.
Certainly, the vaccine is a good thing, and most people will choose to get it. Encouraging vaccination, recommending vaccination, incentivizing and rewarding vaccination, are all good things. But mandating vaccination is not. Americans are a free people, and “My body, my choice” applies to more than just the uterus. No government, directly or through business intermediaries, should compel the introduction of a foreign agent into a free citizen’s body. And no enterprise – of any sort – should think that the prerogative of the employer extends to imposing health choices or medical procedures on its workers.
Hopefully, common decency and respect would keep an employer from imposing any such rule on his employees. It would be a cold-hearted tyrant who would think his authority extended into those recesses of workers’ private lives. Holding a paycheck over someone’s head to compel their compliance in a situation like this is dishonorable.
Hopefully, bosses realize that.
But in case they don’t, if such considerations are beyond them, then perhaps math can be persuasive.
The math that says they can’t afford to lose the workers; and the math that says they can’t afford to lose the customers.
Because vaccine mandates will lose you both – employees and customers – and you can’t afford to lose either.
And don’t buy the Cuomo/Biden argument that being vaccinated-only will help your business. People attracted to such a situation are less prone to be in-person customers than people who would be repulsed by such a situation.
It’s like they say: Woke is broke.
And you don’t want to take the mandatory-vaccination knee.
It won’t help you medically, and it will certainly hurt you economically.
So, respect your employees, and your customers will respect you. Disrespect your employees, and your customers will abandon you.