Data: More Corporates in the US Mandating Vaccines

Indeed has released some interesting findings this week around the number of jobs being posted that require a vaccine in order to apply.

As of August 7, the share of job postings that required vaccines jumped by 90% compared to a month earlier.

The data:

• As of August 7, the share of job postings per million that require vaccinations was up 90% compared to a month earlier.
• Some of the industries where this is increasing are in the sphere of non-essential work including software development, marketing, education, and sales.
• For software developers, the share of this has increased by 10,000% since February 2021.

The report noted that jobs requiring a vaccination are still at a small fraction of overall job postings.

The terms:

For organisations looking at how to project and word the requirement, the terms searched to collate the data included:

“vaccine required”, “requires vaccination,” “must-have vaccine,” and “vaccinated against.”

Closer to home:

Although there is some initial use-cases around companies forcing their employees to get the vaccination in Australia, Fairwork Australia’s guidelines are warning employers to proceed down this path with caution.

Most recently they updated their COVID-19 vaccinations: workplace rights and obligations advice noting that:

• Employers should exercise caution if they’re considering making COVID-19 vaccinations mandatory in their workplace and get their own legal advice.
• Employers can only require their employees to be vaccinated where:

• • a specific law (such as a state or territory public health order) requires an employee to be vaccinated (see Legislation and public health orders requiring vaccination against coronavirus)
  • the requirement is permitted by an enterprise agreement, other registered agreement or employment contract (see Agreements or contracts relating to vaccinations), or
  • it would be lawful and reasonable for an employer to give their employees a direction to be vaccinated, which is assessed on a case-by-case basis (see Lawful and reasonable directions to get vaccinated).

Quotes:

“We do not have a mandatory vaccination policy in this country… We do not have that. We’re not proposing to have that. That is not changing. But an employer may make a reasonable directive to staff and if they do so, they will have to stay consistent with the law and particularly in dealing with a situation where an employee may be in direct contact, potentially become infected and acquire the virus.” – Prime Minister Scott Morrison, 6th August