XpertHR consultant editor Darren Newman examines the ongoing debate about whether employers can insist on employees being vaccinated against Covid-19 – a policy pithily summarised as no jab, no job.
So can an employer insist on vaccination? Almost inevitably – it depends. Clearly, requiring someone to be vaccinated is a very different proposition from requiring them to take a Covid-19 test or wear protective equipment.
Being told to inject a substance into your body is clearly a much more intrusive requirement than wearing a mask or even taking a Covid-19 test. There is a human rights issue here.
No-one could have been surprised when an employment tribunal found that a lorry driver was fairly dismissed when he refused to comply with an instruction to wear a facemask while on a client’s site (Kubilius v Kent Foods Ltd). The client banned the lorry driver from its site and the tribunal found that dismissal was within the range of reasonable responses.
Whether there really was a need for a mask to be worn while the driver was sitting in his own lorry is really neither here nor there. It was clearly misconduct to refuse to comply (despite repeated requests) with the rules in place on the client’s site.
Wearing a face mask may be uncomfortable and the employee may have disagreed with the client’s assessment that he needed to wear it even when he was sitting alone in his lorry cab but there was no suggestion that the mask would have caused the employee any harm – he just didn’t want to wear it.
Sign up to our weekly round-up of HR news and guidance
Receive the Personnel Today Direct e-newsletter every Wednesday
A vaccination is different. It is not just something that is worn during the working day and can then be discarded. Being told to inject a substance into your body is clearly a much more intrusive requirement than wearing a mask or even taking a Covid-19 test. There is a human rights issue here.
Continue reading the full article on XpertHR
