On Nov. 4, the Biden administration announced that they were moving forward with plans to require employees in large businesses to be vaccinated. While this new mandate has been received with mixed responses, the mandate will undoubtedly help large Syracuse businesses, in turn bettering the community.

This mandate is applicable to all businesses with 100 or more employees. It states that companies must enforce COVID-19 vaccinations for all employees or create an option where staff members are tested frequently and always masked if unvaccinated. It also establishes paid time for workers to get vaccinated as well as paid sick leave to recover from vaccine side effects.  

Richard Braungart, a professor of sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, said he believes that the mandate will be helpful for large businesses. Braungart said many large businesses wanted Biden to issue a mandate to implement an overarching authority that would spare the businesses from having to deal with the anti-vaccine backlash, various reasons for not getting vaccinated, low employee morale and lower insurance costs. 

Braungart also said that there are benefits to the mandate from a common sense standpoint, separate from the employer perspective.

“Businesses with vaccinated employees have a better chance to maintain the business itself, its productivity and bottom line, since they are not hobbled by the loss of employees due to COVID-19 sickness and deaths as well as employees who do not want to work where employees are not vaccinated and following the CDC guidelines to reduce the spread of the virus,” he said. 

With the new mandate ensuring vaccinated and relatively consistent healthy employees, success of larger businesses is guaranteed.  

Kristi Andersen, a professor of political science at Maxwell, said she hopes the mandate will help businesses, especially since so many are currently understaffed and wrestling with supply chain issues. Although the mandate is estimated to cover about two-thirds of the private sector workforce according to the Biden administration, Andersen said she believes the mandate will prove to be most helpful within one specific area: the health care sector. 

“In New York and elsewhere, hospitals were quite worried that pushback against mandates would severely reduce staff numbers — but that did not happen. Vaccination rates are higher than predicted, and for at least some ‘vaccine hesitant’ people, the mandate pushed them into making a decision that they hadn’t quite been able to make on their own,” Andersen said.

The largest employment sectors in Syracuse are health care & social assistance, educational services and retail trade, according to Data USA. “(The new vaccine mandate) is in the best interest of these areas of employment and city of Syracuse to reduce the spread of COVID-19 since these are largely people-oriented areas of service,” said Braungart in regard to the information from Data USA.

These specific businesses require a lot of customer and employee interaction and the mandate will ensure less of a chance of spreading COVID-19 between these contacts. 

The Biden administration is receiving both criticism and support for its new authorization, which Andersen said she believes is because of the unfortunate politicization of COVID-19, vaccines and mandates. On Nov. 6, a federal appeals court temporarily halted the mandate because of the heavy push back from the Republican party. Multiple circuits, several of which became more conservative due to former President Donald Trump’s judicial appointments, in at least 27 states filed lawsuits against the mandate, according to NPR.

Both Andersen and Braungart said that the mandate is beneficial for large Syracuse businesses, as well as our country as a whole, if we are successful in increasing vaccination rates. “Mandates will help, as will the upcoming widespread vaccination of children,” Andersen said.

Relying on unvaccinated herd immunity has not worked, Braungart said, but following CDC guidelines and getting vaccinated has proven to reduce the spread, severity, deaths and long-term effects of the disease. 

Braungart said those with anti-vaccine mandate beliefs “base their argument on their citizenship right and freedom to refuse to adhere to a government mandate. However, the duties of citizenship also include the responsibility to consider the consequences of individual decisions and behavior on the common good of other individuals and society. Freedom and responsibility are connected, not separate.” 

The new mandate is going to help Syracuse businesses by requiring vaccines and therefore reducing the spread of COVID-19 within the community. With this new enforcement, students and community members can feel safer in larger businesses in the Syracuse area knowing there is a smaller risk of contracting COVID-19 due to the new masking mandate. 

Charlotte Kho is a junior magazine, news & digital journalism major. Her column appears biweekly. She can be reached at ckho01@syr.edu.

Published on November 9, 2021 at 12:21 am