Won't this create an incentive not to get the vaccine in order to continue working from home? Or to lie about your vaccination status? Companies should either institute broad vaccine mandates, or allow both vaccinated and unvaccinated employees to work from home, or bring everyone back to the office. Any policy tying your wfh status to vaccines will be abused.
If anything, employees who get the vaccine should be the ones allowed to work from home, not the contrary, though this creates a health risk by concentrating all the unvaccinated employees together at the office.
I suspect that UBS leadership perceive working at the office as desirable.
Maybe it is the same perception for UBS employees. Maybe those at home miss out on some perks or even get neglected by their managers. Personally I doubt it, and I expect there's probably a sinister undertone to this message along the lines of "Those who work at home will be treated as less willing" or something.
Ex UBS employee here, 12 years including Swissbank pre merger.
They do more than most to avoid negative publicity, especially any that might come from legal action. Related to that (or not) and very much on the plus side, they are (or at least were) a good employer.
What’s not clear from this is whether those taking advantage will suffer any downsides. My guess is that they will as far as possible make that job-specific.
Two clicks ahead they explain that "Hamers is rolling out a permanent hybrid working model for the firm globally, allowing at least two thirds of its employees to mix work from home and the office. Traders are part of the “25% to one third" of the bank’s staff for whom it is “really difficult" to work from home". Those people are banned for entering the bank buildings if they don't have a vaxx proof, so it's either get the jab or get out.
Wouldn't that entirely depend on the quality of observation?
I live in a state with a lot of flooding. I've personally witnessed several floods in the past 30 years, including those described as 100 year and 500 year flood levels. I've never seen anyone die in a flood, and nobody died due to flood waters in the two events above. Should I then conclude that flood waters, though very damaging to property, are safe?
Working from home means you lose all office politics by default. It is possible for companies to mitigate this, but most do not. Thus working from home is bad for your future promotions.
Why does the freedom to infect others outweigh the freedom to survive a preventable disease? You don't get to pick and choose which parts of the social compact to follow as it suits you.
These people want to not have the vaccine AND to work at home so they don't infect others. You'd have a point if they wanted the right to remain unvaccinated while demanding they be allowed to work in the office. Would you prefer if companies just fired everyone who, for whatever misguided reason, don't want the vaccine?
Is "vaccine refuser" a protected class or something inalienable about a person? Does everyone have the right to work anywhere they wish? Plenty of other vaccines are required to attend college and to participate in other parts of society, why is this vaccine different?
In this case its different because UBS apparently doesn't want to fire a bunch of people. Plus, as the article says, different countries have different rules about what an employer is legally allowed to make a condition of employment.
Could a taxi company fire a driver refusing to wear a seat belt?
Could a construction company fire some refusing to wear a helmet?
Could a hospital fire a surgeon who refuses to wear a mask and gloves during operation?
Vaccines don't prevent transmission, you are not helping anyone but yourself with the vaccine, except for not making yourself into a burden for the medical infrastructure.
If you leave quarantine you expose yourself to risk.
It's your choice to leave quarantine or not. It's your choice to get a vaccine or not.
This is a personal responsibility issue.
Not a society wide issue.
It's never been anyone's responsibility to wear a bubble suit to protect immuno-compromised people, or stop eating meat because of people with high cholesterol..
and it's not anyone's responsibility to get a vaccine to protect other people from covid.
Personally Im a hurricane evacuee and we are grateful for the help we don't demand you help us at risk to your livelihood.
The societal risk of infecting immuno compromised people with random generic disease is small. Scale matters. Similarly you're not allowed to walk around new york if you're confirmed to be carrying a novel strain of ebola.
Permitting individuals to choose to be vaccinated and building owners to choose to forbid vaccinated people seems reasonable to me. Sacrificing individual freedoms for the mutual benefit of the larger group is the very core concept of society.
To a large number of people.... a survivability of 99.99% is an acceptable risk for people to go out in society freely, like you have with most age groups in Covid.
To some people ONE death is too many because the value of a human life is priceless.
What's the correct, scientifically determined, objective scale of people dying, to allow the government to turn things into a medical fascist state?
My argument is that there is no objectively correct 'scale' because it's not a scientific measure therefore doesn't matter.
It's just the news and government yelling scary death numbers until enough kind-hearted but ignorant people are scared enough to sacrifice their freedoms.
1) Things don't fall into the set of {objective, irrelevant}. There is also "subjective". Which is why we vote to agree on things as a group.
2) There are middle grounds between fascist states and passing some regulations
3) The news being a fearmongering whore doesn't invalidate the fact that some of what it reports may be a genuine threat
4) The right of america has historically fond of "if you don't like it, you can go to another country". Surely it's strictly less impactful to say "if you don't like it, you can work from home".
Even the most extreme views of libertarianism have the principle of "do not harm others" as the limit for one's freedoms. In fact, other political philosophies have a softer view on this principle, like utilitarianism (maximize wellness even if it goes against a minory).
Rothbard, and I doubt you can find anyone much more libertarian than him, wrote that if you knowingly cause suffering or death of another human being, you must be punished "an eye for an eye". In this case, if you spread covid and somebody dies or gets injured because of it, you should fully restitute the victim, even being executed if the heirs decide so.
From a philosophical point of view, freedom or libertarianism doesn't help you here. I would like to read any libertarian serious author that supports your views.
> knowingly cause suffering or death of another human being
>if you spread covid
No one knows how Covid spreads or who it will kill. Your argument is weak from the very start.
But assuming we know exactly that if someone doesn't wear a mask they will kill some person who is vulnerable.
Whose responsibility is that?
The vulnerable person for leaving the house or the entire public for not accommodating that person?
No matter how much mental gymnastics you'd like to do...I'd argue most libertarian thinkers would take the 'individualist' stance vs the 'collectivist' stance.
As that's the basis of the entire libertarian philosophy.
I think GP meant that people choosing not to get a vaccine and WFH permanently will be at best treated as second class citizens, and at worst be first in line for layoffs.
They can use this as a way to get the people who don't vaccinate to self identify by luring them into
"you don't have to come back to the office, you can work from home".
Once people have been identified they will have the list of people to let go.
Using the term antivaxer is the first step to dehumanizing people.
Next, comes "the antivaxers have a choice" conversations and some of them do, some have a mental block ( could be called mental illness), some may have what they perceive as a healthy fear of the government, which is justified as the government has done some pretty shady things like giving people Syphilis under the guise of medical care.
The nazi comparison is hyperbole of the worst kind and makes it hard to engage with this line of argument. It also tends to make Jewish people very angry and I can see why.
Lol, nobody is going to gas the antivaxxers and put them to death.
The worst possible imaginable thing would be forcible vaccination.
Which amounts to a needle prick (that you honestly can't even feel) followed by dramatically reduced incidence of disease and a bunch of people will live a lot longer than they would otherwise.
But, yeah, that totally sounds like genocide to me.
The linked Bloomberg news article is a much more informative source than this summary of Twitter comments. If anything, it doesn't make the mistake of calling the bank the "USB Group".
The fact that anyone would think it is the responsibility of employers to force others to do anything... just amazing. You know that there is a system already in place to do that, right? It is even designed to guard against abuses that businesses aren't equipped for: this is a function of government. If you want to force your vision of the world on others - lobby the government, that is what it is there for.
Businesses and people can make their own choices and run their lives how they see fit.
That's literally the definition of freedom.
The government exists to provide a safe framework to protect property and to provide for the common defense for people to live free and make thier own choices.
Yes, exactly correct at least for me. Two excellent example. These are mostly victimless, if somebody make a bad choice here he is harming himself. Seatbelt law for small children though is maybe okay.
That's not what OP said; they said it's society's job to social engineer government.
Politics is the allocation of scarce resources; so by definition it exhibits preferences in those allocations, whether the whim of a tyrant, an iron law of utility, or a social contract.
Guns versus butter is the toy example from macroeconomics 101, but absolutely government is the net sum of its opportunity costs.
I would love it if the government required vaccination but the last time the government did something controversial, a bunch of looters and thugs stormed the US Capitol and killed several police officers.
lol, nothing has ever not happened more than this. If this isn't a parody representation of somebody who definitely shouldn't have any say about anybody else's health decisions, but an honest reflection of what you really believe... you should really think on how you came to be so badly mislead - and to what end.
>Brian Sicknick, a 42-year-old responding Capitol Police officer, was pepper-sprayed during the riot, and had two thromboembolic strokes the next day, after which he was placed on life support, and soon died.
>In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some members of Congress and press reports included these two suicides in the number of reported casualties, for a total of seven deaths. In July, two more members of law enforcement who responded to the attack died by suicide.
PTSD so strong as to almost instantly result in suicide? Wow. Being an actual combat vet, I can tell you with authority that your time would be better spent looking up "moral injury" instead of researching definitions for PTSD that fit your usage. That wouldn't fit the lie, though.
You've been using HN primarily for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of their ideology, because it's destructive of the intended use of this site.
I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but your account is way over the line for bannability. (The criteria we apply are explained in past comments here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....) Seriously not cool. If you keep this up, we will have to ban you, so please stop and use HN as intended.
>I would love it if the government required vaccination but the last time the government did something controversial, a bunch of looters and thugs stormed the US Capitol and killed several police officers.
As sennight said, that is a lie. The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
>Diaz told the Washington Post that there was no evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or was otherwise injured, but stated that "all that transpired played a role in his condition."
>Dr. Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist, said that Sicknick's manner of death could have been classified as accidental, a homicide, or undetermined.
It sure would be a strange coincidence if his stroke was entirely unrelated as you say.
"all that transpired played a role in his condition" just means that when something medical happens to someone, obviously everything before the event is evaluated. That doesn't change the fact that
a) Sicknick was never hit by a fire extinguisher, contrary to the early frenzied media reports—corrected weeks after the fact, if at all—that linked such a blow to his death (and contrary to his family, which always insisted that he had never been attacked so)
b) the autopsy specifically looked for some causal effect from the pepper spray and his death, and found nothing
Wecht did not examine Sicknick but claims to be "shocked, amazed" by the "natural" verdict for the officer's death. He does so using a worker's comp example, which is inapplicable in this case. Were it applicable, every single time a police officer dies of a heart attack or stroke a day after a stressful event, the pathologist should rule that death as "non-natural", which of course is nonsense. Heck, Wecht goes further and says—again, without having participated in the autopsy—that there is a strong case for ruling the death a homicide! Good grief.
Please stop using HN for political and ideological battle. We've already had to ask you this. If you keep it up, we're going to have to ban you, because it's destructive of what this site is supposed to be for.
Posting this sort of ideological flamebait to HN is abusive. If it isn't arson, it's criminal negligence.
Since we've asked you many times not to do this on HN and you've continued to do it repeatedly, I've banned your account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
But a business has a legitimate incentive to want their employees vaccinated. Every Covid infection is lost productivity. And if it goes poorly, that could be an empty seat that now needs to be filled.
There is no end to such a line of logic though, except that they can demand anything they want - so long as it can be argued to decrease productivity. You really want that? That maternity leave... I wonder how much work gets done.
> There is no end to such a line of logic though, except that they can demand anything they want - so long as it can be argued to decrease productivity
We carefully place limits for things like race. However those are narrow things.
> That maternity leave... I wonder how much work gets done.
That is one reason companies don't mandate everything (although it is mandated): companies with good maternity leave policies are more attractive to potential employees. This is more valuable than the time lost.
> Something so true that it has to be compelled by law!
Just because it is compelled by law doesn't mean it has to be. My company gives me paternity leave which isn't compelled by law, so I'm sure they would give maternity leave even without the law.
If the people of a country see something as being worth the lost productivity (maternity leave for example), the correct way to handle it would be to legislate it. I agree with sibling commenter that there is an incentive in attracting a wider range of employees for offering benefits that aren't required by law, but I think it's not really enough given the power difference between employees and employers.
Of course, legislative solutions are increasingly impossible in some parts of the world. This is the reason we're relying on companies to make this call.
The labor minister of Germany recently said that companies cannot force employees to disclose their immunization status.
There is a conflict between health on the one side and civil liberties/privacy on the other.
We need to achieve a reasonable balance. Draconian ‘thou shalt’ demands are not the solutions but more and more companies are starting to require evidence of vaccination whether you’re going to the office or not.
I hope this gets settled by the labor board or the Supreme Court rather than companies takin that mantle to impose a mandate themselves.
Immunization status has never really been considered private. It’s been the norm for 100 years for immunizations to be disclosed to schools, to foreign governments for international travel, to certain types of employers, etc.
And yet it’s never been required for most types of jobs. And here the labor minister is coming down on the side of employees.
And it’s important to note, companies are requiring vaccination status whether you’re hybrid or fully remote. Fully remote offering no exposure risk to the company.
It’s never been required for jobs because historically the most virulent transmissible diseases were spread by children and adolescents. And in Germany of course the Labor Minister is going to push back on anything demanded by any employer - there is no information in his position.
Flu was spread a lot in many workplace where I've been, among adults. No flu shot requirement. Anybody who want a requirement for coronavirus vaccine should had flu shot requirement these past years or at least should make one now.
COVID is much more deadly than the flu, though. While I guess it makes sense to draw the line somewhere, I could see more employers mandating flu shot in the future.
Those remote workers are still on the company healthcare plan, and their un-vaxxed status and higher risk of illness/higher cost of treatment definitely creates risk for the company.
Some companies are already charging un-vaxxed employees higher health insurance premiums just for this reason.
You never have any level of reasonable expectation that you’ll be admitted to a country you don’t have citizenship or a visa for. It’s a substantially different scenario.
Companies are potentially putting themselves in quite a lot of legal risk...
For example, imagine a worker infects and kills another worker, and there is evidence of that (for example an office air filter is tested and finds high COVID-19 levels). Now the company has opened itself up to corporate manslaughter charges because they didn't do enough to keep their office disease free.
Cases of 'long covid' could also be very expensive if people start claiming they have sufficient brain fog they can no longer work, so they deserve a payout of a lifetimes salary with some multiplier.
Does that mean there is standing to sue companies for not mitigating other transmissible diseases that could be mitigated by screening and other methods employers don’t currently carry out?
In Lithuania there is the "opportunity passport" which was designed to show you are safe. You can get it if you are fully vaccinated, have recovered (identified by a positive PCR test or have antibodies), or have had a negative PCR test in the last 48 hours. This allows you to show you are 'safe' without disclosing whether you have been vaccinated or not, so it solves the privacy issue.
There is of course controversy even with this, as the government is saying unvaccinated people will have to pay for PCR tests to get this (before it was free) and it appears with the Delta variant there is a much higher risk of breakthrough infections.
Personally I think what the UK is doing and giving out rapid antigen tests for free and encouraging people - even those fully vaccinated - to do them often (twice weekly) is a much better way of approaching this, but of course it's expensive and you need to trust people to actually do it.
> I hope this gets settled by the labor board or the Supreme Court rather than companies takin that mantle to impose a mandate themselves.
Generally, the default is that private companies can discriminate however they please. In certain cases we've decided that that's not good for a society (race, religion, ethnicity), so we restrict their ability to do that. But why shouldn't private companies be allowed to make their own decisions about things that they perceive (whether they are right or wrong) will improve worker safety? In this case, vaccination status affects other people (in terms of increased risk of transmission + psychological perception), so how is different than my company's current rule that I'm not allowed to smoke at my desk?
That could possibly be permissible for new employees signing a new agreement.
However, “legacy” employees never signed any document of employment stating they were required to disclose vaccination status the way you are told you will have provide proof of identity and so on prior to onboardung.
It seems like it is permissible. The question is whether it is right. In the US at least, employment is generally at-will, meaning they can fire you for basically any reason as long as it isn't discrimination of a protected class. If my employer decided tomorrow to fire anyone who doesn't vote Republican, they can do that. I think it would be unreasonable, but it would be permissable, regardless of whether i had to disclose this going in. But this isn't quite that extreme. Presumably, this is them making a decision based on what they believe is in the best interests for the safety of their overall workforce. Why shouldn't employers be allowed to make decisions that they believe keep employees safe?
A company could tell everyone they hired for finance they now are being transferred to research and development and vice versa. Nothing against the law. But people in finance were not hired to do R&D and people in R&D were not hired to do financials. The company could then of course fire the above for not performing --but HR usually never takes this approach to layoffs. They may eliminate departments or redefine things and then you re-apply and so on with new roles and duties but it's all formal. Companies could require employees to re-apply, but you'd see quite some pushback especially from people who have been there a while and may interpret the move as a threat to their job security.
Yeah that's entirely permissible. My company can move me from engineering to toilet cleaning if they want. I would probably quit because I would think it's unreasonable, but I doubt I'd win any lawsuits. But I'd argue that this bank's decision is both permissible and reasonable.
In this situation, you have three groups of employees. Group A doesn't want the vaccine. Group B gets the vaccine but doesn't care whether Group A does or doesn't. Group C gets the vaccine and also doesn't want to work around people in Group A out of concern for their own safety. The company has to choose to accommodate either Group A or Group C. In this case, they chose the latter. Many companies will choose the former. But I don't see what's unfair about this? Group A might have started with the company with the expectation that vaccine status is private. But Group C might have started with the expectation that the company will take measures for their safety should situations change.
Note: I think it's debatable as to how many restrictions we should have in place because of Covid. But there's no denying that many people want to reduce their exposure to the virus and I don't think it's unreasonable for a private company to accommodate that.
Many U.S. states have labor law that cover this. And any company that I have seen do anything similar to this has lost money to both the state and the claimant.
Typically, at least for at-will states, the employer simply terminates you without stating any reason. Very simple for the company and the employee at least gets unemployment pay.
People not taking a vaccine does not change the risk faced by their coworkers. I don't think you really believe that, hence the "psychological perception" hedge.
Which answers your question: companies should not be able to discriminate in this way for the same reason they aren't allowed to discriminate based on gender, sexuality, etc, even though some surely would. Because it would be irrational and wrong.
> People not taking a vaccine does not change the risk faced by their coworkers. I don't think you really believe that, hence the "psychological perception" hedge.
I don't believe that. The science clearly isn't 100% settled, but I believe that when the dust settles, we'll find that vaccinated people are less likely to get ill and therefore less likely to spread Covid. I could be wrong, but until the science is settled, I don't see what's wrong with discriminating on this basis.
Many countries have compulsory immunization for a set of diseases with disclosure mandated to enrol, for example, in a nursery or primary school.
This is a question of coherency and political courage: Either Covid immunization is of critical importance for public health, which is essentially what we're told, and governments must have the courage to act accordingly, or it is "nice to have" if a person so decides and governments should equally act accordingly.
I would argue that rather than trying to find a balance, we just need to make sure all these measures are temporary.
In normal times an unwavering commitment to freedom in its citizens is a great strength for a country. In normal times, the people who stand up for freedom provide herd immunity against authoritarians.
Let's not adjust the default settings because of a couple of years of abnormal, just because some of those folks wouldn't adjust their ideas to a new situation.
> There is a conflict between health on the one side and civil liberties/privacy on the other.
That's utterly inane no matter how many people believe it. Where I'm from it's illegal to drive drunk, drive faster than the speed limit, shoot guns in the air. Why is you walking around spreading a virus to defenseless people any different?
The Bloomberg article this site links to states that "as governments struggle to encourage vaccine skeptics to take the shot, companies are increasingly using access to company premises as a clear incentive."
I wonder if companies overestimate how much their employees like working fully on-site.
Of course, this was how things were in the past for most people. But it's not like work from home is inferior across the board and we're all eager to ditch it once we can. "Tying" vaccination with the possibility to get back to the office sounds like they think that's the case.
They may not like it but many jobs, even office-based, could tax one heavily if they're not there where all others sit. Customer meetings would be just an example, or workshops, trainings, and so on. Thus missing some points on your performance review scorecard could potentially have some drastic consequences.
For many at UBS this is going to be an invitation to leave. UBS is in the business of asset management and investment banking; these are two areas where relationship building is very important and it's hard to do that over zoom. Sure, for a few months, you can maybe swing it, but if this policy lasts long term, say goodbye to any chance of a promotion, if they let you stick around at all. Sure, maybe some support staff can swing it, but if you're a banker there, you're gonna have to be vaxxed.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 256 ms ] threadIf anything, employees who get the vaccine should be the ones allowed to work from home, not the contrary, though this creates a health risk by concentrating all the unvaccinated employees together at the office.
If only unvaccinated can work from home, yeah, bass-ackwards incentivization.
Maybe it is the same perception for UBS employees. Maybe those at home miss out on some perks or even get neglected by their managers. Personally I doubt it, and I expect there's probably a sinister undertone to this message along the lines of "Those who work at home will be treated as less willing" or something.
They do more than most to avoid negative publicity, especially any that might come from legal action. Related to that (or not) and very much on the plus side, they are (or at least were) a good employer.
What’s not clear from this is whether those taking advantage will suffer any downsides. My guess is that they will as far as possible make that job-specific.
Then working from home would be better no matter vacinnation and the right thing to do is to enforce working from home.
I think that the threat posed by covid, and the necessity of the vax, has been exaggerated.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/04/28/9909860...
You speak from prepared news products delivered remotely by strangers.
Grasp the epistemological difference here.
I offer that firsthand observation makes for better knowledge than secondhand.
I live in a state with a lot of flooding. I've personally witnessed several floods in the past 30 years, including those described as 100 year and 500 year flood levels. I've never seen anyone die in a flood, and nobody died due to flood waters in the two events above. Should I then conclude that flood waters, though very damaging to property, are safe?
You think wrong. Please stop spreading misinformation.
It's your choice to leave quarantine or not. It's your choice to get a vaccine or not.
This is a personal responsibility issue.
Not a society wide issue.
It's never been anyone's responsibility to wear a bubble suit to protect immuno-compromised people, or stop eating meat because of people with high cholesterol.. and it's not anyone's responsibility to get a vaccine to protect other people from covid.
Personally Im a hurricane evacuee and we are grateful for the help we don't demand you help us at risk to your livelihood.
Permitting individuals to choose to be vaccinated and building owners to choose to forbid vaccinated people seems reasonable to me. Sacrificing individual freedoms for the mutual benefit of the larger group is the very core concept of society.
To a large number of people.... a survivability of 99.99% is an acceptable risk for people to go out in society freely, like you have with most age groups in Covid.
To some people ONE death is too many because the value of a human life is priceless.
What's the correct, scientifically determined, objective scale of people dying, to allow the government to turn things into a medical fascist state?
My argument is that there is no objectively correct 'scale' because it's not a scientific measure therefore doesn't matter.
It's just the news and government yelling scary death numbers until enough kind-hearted but ignorant people are scared enough to sacrifice their freedoms.
2) There are middle grounds between fascist states and passing some regulations
3) The news being a fearmongering whore doesn't invalidate the fact that some of what it reports may be a genuine threat
4) The right of america has historically fond of "if you don't like it, you can go to another country". Surely it's strictly less impactful to say "if you don't like it, you can work from home".
How about driving drunk? Fuck everyone else am I right?
So stop whining and putting everyone at risk only because something is mildly inconvenient to you. Grow up already
yes yes it does.
You need to grow up and accept that other people aren't out there to protect you like Mommy and Daddy.
The world does not exist to hold your hand.
Never had been.
Your life, your responsibility, your choices.
That is the essence of freedom and it's beautiful.
It's too bad you would sacrifice freedom for safety.
A bunker would be great for a person to quarantine themselves off from covid too!
Don't leave quarantine ever! Stay home, stay safe, and keep granny safe!
Rothbard, and I doubt you can find anyone much more libertarian than him, wrote that if you knowingly cause suffering or death of another human being, you must be punished "an eye for an eye". In this case, if you spread covid and somebody dies or gets injured because of it, you should fully restitute the victim, even being executed if the heirs decide so.
From a philosophical point of view, freedom or libertarianism doesn't help you here. I would like to read any libertarian serious author that supports your views.
>if you spread covid
No one knows how Covid spreads or who it will kill. Your argument is weak from the very start.
But assuming we know exactly that if someone doesn't wear a mask they will kill some person who is vulnerable.
Whose responsibility is that?
The vulnerable person for leaving the house or the entire public for not accommodating that person?
No matter how much mental gymnastics you'd like to do...I'd argue most libertarian thinkers would take the 'individualist' stance vs the 'collectivist' stance.
As that's the basis of the entire libertarian philosophy.
that doesn't make sense - why would you eating meat harm people with high cholesterol?
> It's never been anyone's responsibility to wear a bubble suit to protect immuno-compromised people
if you're a doctor treating them (or a friend visiting) it is
Once people have been identified they will have the list of people to let go.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1938-nazi-law-forced-...
Read this and substitute Jew for Antivaxer:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Jewish_legislation_in_p...
Using the term antivaxer is the first step to dehumanizing people.
Next, comes "the antivaxers have a choice" conversations and some of them do, some have a mental block ( could be called mental illness), some may have what they perceive as a healthy fear of the government, which is justified as the government has done some pretty shady things like giving people Syphilis under the guise of medical care.
The worst possible imaginable thing would be forcible vaccination.
Which amounts to a needle prick (that you honestly can't even feel) followed by dramatically reduced incidence of disease and a bunch of people will live a lot longer than they would otherwise.
But, yeah, that totally sounds like genocide to me.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-09-02/ubs-ceo-s...
https://www.ubs.com/global/en/our-firm/governance/ubs-group-...
That's literally the definition of freedom.
The government exists to provide a safe framework to protect property and to provide for the common defense for people to live free and make thier own choices.
Politics is the allocation of scarce resources; so by definition it exhibits preferences in those allocations, whether the whim of a tyrant, an iron law of utility, or a social contract.
Guns versus butter is the toy example from macroeconomics 101, but absolutely government is the net sum of its opportunity costs.
lol, nothing has ever not happened more than this. If this isn't a parody representation of somebody who definitely shouldn't have any say about anybody else's health decisions, but an honest reflection of what you really believe... you should really think on how you came to be so badly mislead - and to what end.
>Brian Sicknick, a 42-year-old responding Capitol Police officer, was pepper-sprayed during the riot, and had two thromboembolic strokes the next day, after which he was placed on life support, and soon died.
>In the immediate aftermath of the attack, some members of Congress and press reports included these two suicides in the number of reported casualties, for a total of seven deaths. In July, two more members of law enforcement who responded to the attack died by suicide.
I'm not going to ban you for this right now because we haven't warned you before, but your account is way over the line for bannability. (The criteria we apply are explained in past comments here: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....) Seriously not cool. If you keep this up, we will have to ban you, so please stop and use HN as intended.
As sennight said, that is a lie. The one person who died violently was one of the rioters, an unarmed woman who was shot by Capitol Police. Four other rioters died of natural causes around the time of the riot.
(And before you mention him, Officer Sicknick did not die from being hit by a fire extinguisher because that never happened (<https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/brian-sicknick-fire-exting...>). He died of a stroke which the autopsy found no connection with the riot (<https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/apr/19/brian-sickn...>). And yes, the autopsy also specifically checked—and did not find evidence—for a connection between the stroke and pepper spray.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick#D.C._m...
>Diaz told the Washington Post that there was no evidence that Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or was otherwise injured, but stated that "all that transpired played a role in his condition."
>Dr. Cyril Wecht, a forensic pathologist, said that Sicknick's manner of death could have been classified as accidental, a homicide, or undetermined.
It sure would be a strange coincidence if his stroke was entirely unrelated as you say.
a) Sicknick was never hit by a fire extinguisher, contrary to the early frenzied media reports—corrected weeks after the fact, if at all—that linked such a blow to his death (and contrary to his family, which always insisted that he had never been attacked so)
b) the autopsy specifically looked for some causal effect from the pepper spray and his death, and found nothing
Wecht did not examine Sicknick but claims to be "shocked, amazed" by the "natural" verdict for the officer's death. He does so using a worker's comp example, which is inapplicable in this case. Were it applicable, every single time a police officer dies of a heart attack or stroke a day after a stressful event, the pathologist should rule that death as "non-natural", which of course is nonsense. Heck, Wecht goes further and says—again, without having participated in the autopsy—that there is a strong case for ruling the death a homicide! Good grief.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Since we've asked you many times not to do this on HN and you've continued to do it repeatedly, I've banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We carefully place limits for things like race. However those are narrow things.
> That maternity leave... I wonder how much work gets done.
That is one reason companies don't mandate everything (although it is mandated): companies with good maternity leave policies are more attractive to potential employees. This is more valuable than the time lost.
Oof, that isn't even close to what the civil rights act was designed to address. Conflating this with that would not go the way you'd likely want.
> This is more valuable than the time lost.
Something so true that it has to be compelled by law!
Just because it is compelled by law doesn't mean it has to be. My company gives me paternity leave which isn't compelled by law, so I'm sure they would give maternity leave even without the law.
Of course, legislative solutions are increasingly impossible in some parts of the world. This is the reason we're relying on companies to make this call.
There is a conflict between health on the one side and civil liberties/privacy on the other.
We need to achieve a reasonable balance. Draconian ‘thou shalt’ demands are not the solutions but more and more companies are starting to require evidence of vaccination whether you’re going to the office or not.
I hope this gets settled by the labor board or the Supreme Court rather than companies takin that mantle to impose a mandate themselves.
And it’s important to note, companies are requiring vaccination status whether you’re hybrid or fully remote. Fully remote offering no exposure risk to the company.
Some companies are already charging un-vaxxed employees higher health insurance premiums just for this reason.
how about yellow/vaccination book that you need when travel to fancy places?
For example, imagine a worker infects and kills another worker, and there is evidence of that (for example an office air filter is tested and finds high COVID-19 levels). Now the company has opened itself up to corporate manslaughter charges because they didn't do enough to keep their office disease free.
Cases of 'long covid' could also be very expensive if people start claiming they have sufficient brain fog they can no longer work, so they deserve a payout of a lifetimes salary with some multiplier.
The reason we don't see more cases is because it's very hard to prove that you got the disease from a workplace rather than from some other source.
Also, there aren't many workplace-transmissible diseases in the first world that are too deadly.
Workplace injuries like getting injured by machines are far easier to prove.
There is of course controversy even with this, as the government is saying unvaccinated people will have to pay for PCR tests to get this (before it was free) and it appears with the Delta variant there is a much higher risk of breakthrough infections.
Personally I think what the UK is doing and giving out rapid antigen tests for free and encouraging people - even those fully vaccinated - to do them often (twice weekly) is a much better way of approaching this, but of course it's expensive and you need to trust people to actually do it.
Generally, the default is that private companies can discriminate however they please. In certain cases we've decided that that's not good for a society (race, religion, ethnicity), so we restrict their ability to do that. But why shouldn't private companies be allowed to make their own decisions about things that they perceive (whether they are right or wrong) will improve worker safety? In this case, vaccination status affects other people (in terms of increased risk of transmission + psychological perception), so how is different than my company's current rule that I'm not allowed to smoke at my desk?
However, “legacy” employees never signed any document of employment stating they were required to disclose vaccination status the way you are told you will have provide proof of identity and so on prior to onboardung.
In this situation, you have three groups of employees. Group A doesn't want the vaccine. Group B gets the vaccine but doesn't care whether Group A does or doesn't. Group C gets the vaccine and also doesn't want to work around people in Group A out of concern for their own safety. The company has to choose to accommodate either Group A or Group C. In this case, they chose the latter. Many companies will choose the former. But I don't see what's unfair about this? Group A might have started with the company with the expectation that vaccine status is private. But Group C might have started with the expectation that the company will take measures for their safety should situations change.
Note: I think it's debatable as to how many restrictions we should have in place because of Covid. But there's no denying that many people want to reduce their exposure to the virus and I don't think it's unreasonable for a private company to accommodate that.
Many U.S. states have labor law that cover this. And any company that I have seen do anything similar to this has lost money to both the state and the claimant.
Typically, at least for at-will states, the employer simply terminates you without stating any reason. Very simple for the company and the employee at least gets unemployment pay.
Which answers your question: companies should not be able to discriminate in this way for the same reason they aren't allowed to discriminate based on gender, sexuality, etc, even though some surely would. Because it would be irrational and wrong.
I don't believe that. The science clearly isn't 100% settled, but I believe that when the dust settles, we'll find that vaccinated people are less likely to get ill and therefore less likely to spread Covid. I could be wrong, but until the science is settled, I don't see what's wrong with discriminating on this basis.
This is a question of coherency and political courage: Either Covid immunization is of critical importance for public health, which is essentially what we're told, and governments must have the courage to act accordingly, or it is "nice to have" if a person so decides and governments should equally act accordingly.
In normal times an unwavering commitment to freedom in its citizens is a great strength for a country. In normal times, the people who stand up for freedom provide herd immunity against authoritarians.
Let's not adjust the default settings because of a couple of years of abnormal, just because some of those folks wouldn't adjust their ideas to a new situation.
That's utterly inane no matter how many people believe it. Where I'm from it's illegal to drive drunk, drive faster than the speed limit, shoot guns in the air. Why is you walking around spreading a virus to defenseless people any different?
It isn't.
I wonder if companies overestimate how much their employees like working fully on-site.
Of course, this was how things were in the past for most people. But it's not like work from home is inferior across the board and we're all eager to ditch it once we can. "Tying" vaccination with the possibility to get back to the office sounds like they think that's the case.