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I don't think the people putting these mandates in place appreciate the emotional harm it causes employees. My relationship with my employer went from something

I don't think the people putting these mandates in place appreciate the emotional harm it causes employees. My relationship with my employer went from something slightly positive to pretty negative after just one threatening email. This kind of thing combined with working from home makes finding motivation so much more difficult. It's all subconscious too, and it's much stronger than I would have expected.

jasonpeacock 5y ago
I wish my employer _had_ instituted a vaccine mandate, and I'm disappointed in seeing Google reneging on theirs. It would have improved my relationship with my employer, increasing my trust in them. I've been disappointing in their slowness to respond to a public health crisis.
- goldenchrome 5y ago
  Care/harm is not the only moral that exists. Many people think it’s just as immoral to force individuals to inject something into themselves in order to remain employed.
  - pornel 5y ago
    You don't have a moral right to spreading of a deadly disease onto your coworkers (which you may be doing knowingly or not, with much higher probability if you're unvaxed). So you either accept rules that are acceptable to the affected people around you, or stay away from others.
    - tapoxi 5y ago
      This isn’t the goal of the vaccine. You can and probably will still get mildly ill with newer variants and remain contagious. Vaccination will prevent you from getting seriously ill.
  - KerrAvon 5y ago
    Many people should stop listening to the blathering of right-wing idiots and get with the public health programs of the past century. Forcing a vax mandate on everyone isn’t fair to people who are genuinely at risk if vaccinated, but the alternative should be WFH where possible or that you move to a different job if WFH physically won’t work. This is literally a public health crisis. There is a libertarian argument that this is bad for individual liberty, and I am also sympathetic to that. We generally give up some liberty in exchange for living in a society with other people. I can’t walk around my place of employment naked and smoking a blunt without getting fired. You can argue that that’s wrong too, and if so that would mean you’re not a hypocrite, congrats, I salute you.
    - adolph 5y ago
      > This is literally a public health crisis. Was and could be again. Not “is.”
- coffeefirst 5y ago
  Right. This is a trade-off. 1. Piss off the anti-vaxxers by having a mandate. 2. Piss off everyone else by giving in to a paranoid fringe. They did not solve this problem, they just moved it around into a more complicated form. Instead of dealing with people who want to stay remote so they don't have to follow the mandate, it's going to start with someone who has an immunocompromised family member and discovers an unvaccinated person on their team came to work with a cough.
  - _-david-_ 5y ago
    Believe it or not, but there are quite a few people who are very much pro vaccine and have taken the covid vaccine that are opposed to the mandate. The idea that anybody who does not support a mandate is anti vax is ridiculous. The majority of the people I have talked to about the mandate who have taken the vaccine are opposed to it.
    - twox2 5y ago
      I'm vaccinated but anti-mandate.
      - bravetraveler 5y ago
        I'm finding myself similarly... Feel free to gloss over this, I'm processing if nothing else. I made my own decision early on that vaccination wasn't significant for me. I had been exposed [and a very mild case] due to forced travel during that window where we knew COVID existed, but acted like it had not yet entered the country. Natural immunity plus the fact that I live alone, never go out, and have been remote since before the pandemic... it wasn't a high priority for me. I felt reasonably safe and unlikely to spread it should it find me again. It was all to comply with federal mandates for contractors - my employer decided that this should apply to all [including remote] employees. It was more than a little inconvenient going out of my way to get vaccinated for arguably little gain. I might even say added risk in my case. The reporting process alone made me miss several deadlines. Asinine things like not being able to confirm my vaccination status until it sat in my veins for two weeks.
- lern_too_spel 5y ago
  Google is interested in reducing employment costs. A vaccine mandate makes sense when supply of Covid treatments is low. When supply of Covid treatments is no longer constrained (due to a combination of high enough vaccination rate and high enough supply of treatment), the cost of enforcing the mandate is higher than the cost of Covid.
titzer 5y ago
It's really unfortunate that vaccines got sucked into the culture war / tribalism / political divides. That meant that a dialogue about risks and benefits of deploying a response to a public health crisis got tinged with distrust, anger, and division in a way unprecedented in modern times. What I've seen is that it's raised the temperature of every interaction to anticipate the worst possible response and preemptively defend against it. Threatening emails without provocation sound a bit like that dynamic. It sucks for everyone. But it's hard to de-escalate.
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  >But it's hard to de-escalate. It's trivial to de-escalate for WFH companies at least; We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong. Don't do that and people can hold whatever opinions they like about the vaccine individually.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    So requiring the MMR vaccine for preschoolers is like Unit 731?
  - titzer 5y ago
    Expecting that your ideological opponents to completely back down in order to de-escalate is not de-escalation. De-escalation is incremental and generally done in small lock-steps, with all parties relaxing their postures, not by asserting polarizing and simplistic absolutes and expecting to "win". What you wrote above is part of the dynamic that prevents de-escalation.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong And yet require vaccines for large part of life pre-covid with no prior complaints.
shrubble 5y ago
At the company I work at, the HR EVP said on an internal videocast, 'if $CEO makes the decision for you to be vaccinated, then you'll have to be vaccinated' which really came across as imperious. Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees?
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  > Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees? I would not choose to work with selfish colleagues, who don't know or care about their medical decisions causing harm to others (or the burden they potentially place on the medical system; the data is clear vaccinations reduce the severity of a COVID infection from ICU worth to something more benign). It's company culture (with regards to company leadership mandating vaccination). Citigroup employs over 200k workers, and lost less than 2k who refused vaccination [1]. The only employers this would impact would be smaller employers who predominately employ those against vaccination. TLDR Why would I not want to work for a CEO who cares about public health, as well as the welfare of others and myself by mandating a proven safe vaccine? This is what leadership looks like. [1] https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/citigroup-hits-99-percent-compliance-with-covid-vaccine-mandate/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/citigroup-hits-99-percent-comp...
  - twox2 5y ago
    I'm glad the mandates are being lifted. They no longer serve purpose. Maybe they did for a brief moment, but now there's little benefit to the greater good by imposing vaccines that don't do much to curb the spread.
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Personally, this pandemic strongly illuminated why the United States is on its path to a failed social fabric, the likelihood of turning the ship around (low), and personally, that a large proportion of my fellow citizens/residents are not "my people" (the collective "us" versus "me, me, me"); it solidified my plans to expatriate somewhere with stronger social fabric and support of a shared common/greater good. More power to those who stick around while Rome burns.
telchior 5y ago
Could you explain a bit about what lead to the emotional harm? I'm not sure if it was the threatening email or not -- if the email had been as non-threatening as possible, yet a mandate was still put in place, would you have felt the same or not? (And what exactly was in the email?)
- VancouverMan 5y ago
  Any unwanted medical procedure, regardless of what exactly that procedure entails, is a form of bodily molestation and bodily violation. We should expect somebody being coerced by an authority figure to undergo an unwanted medical procedure, especially when that individual's livelihood is being threatened, to find it to be an emotionally traumatic experience, regardless of how severe the coercion is. The situation can easily be made worse when the procedure may have unknown harmful side effects, and when it comes out of the blue.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I can only speak for myself, but it certainly impacted my relationship with my employer. Aside from it feeling intrusive into my personal health choices, It seemed to be an extreme ultimatum that reframed the power dynamic and how they valued me as an employee. An apt analogy would be if your husband/wife threatens divorce because you left socks on the floor. Even if you don't mind picking them up, or were planning to already, it is shocking and damaging that they would go straight to the nuclear option. Flip-flopping on the issue almost makes it worse. If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership.
  - vineyardmike 5y ago
    > If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership they never cared. You can like your job, you can love it. You can feel valued and like you contribute but its just a job, and they will drop you faster than you'll drop them.

jasonpeacock 5y ago

I wish my employer _had_ instituted a vaccine mandate, and I'm disappointed in seeing Google reneging on theirs. It would have improved my relationship with my employer, increasing my trust in them. I've been disappointing in their slowness to respond to a public health crisis.

goldenchrome 5y ago
Care/harm is not the only moral that exists. Many people think it’s just as immoral to force individuals to inject something into themselves in order to remain employed.
- pornel 5y ago
  You don't have a moral right to spreading of a deadly disease onto your coworkers (which you may be doing knowingly or not, with much higher probability if you're unvaxed). So you either accept rules that are acceptable to the affected people around you, or stay away from others.
  - tapoxi 5y ago
    This isn’t the goal of the vaccine. You can and probably will still get mildly ill with newer variants and remain contagious. Vaccination will prevent you from getting seriously ill.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  Many people should stop listening to the blathering of right-wing idiots and get with the public health programs of the past century. Forcing a vax mandate on everyone isn’t fair to people who are genuinely at risk if vaccinated, but the alternative should be WFH where possible or that you move to a different job if WFH physically won’t work. This is literally a public health crisis. There is a libertarian argument that this is bad for individual liberty, and I am also sympathetic to that. We generally give up some liberty in exchange for living in a society with other people. I can’t walk around my place of employment naked and smoking a blunt without getting fired. You can argue that that’s wrong too, and if so that would mean you’re not a hypocrite, congrats, I salute you.
  - adolph 5y ago
    > This is literally a public health crisis. Was and could be again. Not “is.”
coffeefirst 5y ago
Right. This is a trade-off. 1. Piss off the anti-vaxxers by having a mandate. 2. Piss off everyone else by giving in to a paranoid fringe. They did not solve this problem, they just moved it around into a more complicated form. Instead of dealing with people who want to stay remote so they don't have to follow the mandate, it's going to start with someone who has an immunocompromised family member and discovers an unvaccinated person on their team came to work with a cough.
- _-david-_ 5y ago
  Believe it or not, but there are quite a few people who are very much pro vaccine and have taken the covid vaccine that are opposed to the mandate. The idea that anybody who does not support a mandate is anti vax is ridiculous. The majority of the people I have talked to about the mandate who have taken the vaccine are opposed to it.
  - twox2 5y ago
    I'm vaccinated but anti-mandate.
    - bravetraveler 5y ago
      I'm finding myself similarly... Feel free to gloss over this, I'm processing if nothing else. I made my own decision early on that vaccination wasn't significant for me. I had been exposed [and a very mild case] due to forced travel during that window where we knew COVID existed, but acted like it had not yet entered the country. Natural immunity plus the fact that I live alone, never go out, and have been remote since before the pandemic... it wasn't a high priority for me. I felt reasonably safe and unlikely to spread it should it find me again. It was all to comply with federal mandates for contractors - my employer decided that this should apply to all [including remote] employees. It was more than a little inconvenient going out of my way to get vaccinated for arguably little gain. I might even say added risk in my case. The reporting process alone made me miss several deadlines. Asinine things like not being able to confirm my vaccination status until it sat in my veins for two weeks.
lern_too_spel 5y ago
Google is interested in reducing employment costs. A vaccine mandate makes sense when supply of Covid treatments is low. When supply of Covid treatments is no longer constrained (due to a combination of high enough vaccination rate and high enough supply of treatment), the cost of enforcing the mandate is higher than the cost of Covid.

titzer 5y ago

It's really unfortunate that vaccines got sucked into the culture war / tribalism / political divides. That meant that a dialogue about risks and benefits of deploying a response to a public health crisis got tinged with distrust, anger, and division in a way unprecedented in modern times. What I've seen is that it's raised the temperature of every interaction to anticipate the worst possible response and preemptively defend against it. Threatening emails without provocation sound a bit like that dynamic. It sucks for everyone. But it's hard to de-escalate.

pinephoneguy 5y ago
>But it's hard to de-escalate. It's trivial to de-escalate for WFH companies at least; We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong. Don't do that and people can hold whatever opinions they like about the vaccine individually.
- spoonjim 5y ago
  So requiring the MMR vaccine for preschoolers is like Unit 731?
- titzer 5y ago
  Expecting that your ideological opponents to completely back down in order to de-escalate is not de-escalation. De-escalation is incremental and generally done in small lock-steps, with all parties relaxing their postures, not by asserting polarizing and simplistic absolutes and expecting to "win". What you wrote above is part of the dynamic that prevents de-escalation.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > We agreed last century that forced medical treatment was wrong And yet require vaccines for large part of life pre-covid with no prior complaints.

shrubble 5y ago

At the company I work at, the HR EVP said on an internal videocast, 'if $CEO makes the decision for you to be vaccinated, then you'll have to be vaccinated' which really came across as imperious. Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees?

toomuchtodo 5y ago
> Why should the CEO be making medical decisions for 1000s of employees? I would not choose to work with selfish colleagues, who don't know or care about their medical decisions causing harm to others (or the burden they potentially place on the medical system; the data is clear vaccinations reduce the severity of a COVID infection from ICU worth to something more benign). It's company culture (with regards to company leadership mandating vaccination). Citigroup employs over 200k workers, and lost less than 2k who refused vaccination [1]. The only employers this would impact would be smaller employers who predominately employ those against vaccination. TLDR Why would I not want to work for a CEO who cares about public health, as well as the welfare of others and myself by mandating a proven safe vaccine? This is what leadership looks like. [1] https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/citigroup-hits-99-percent-compliance-with-covid-vaccine-mandate/ https://nypost.com/2022/01/14/citigroup-hits-99-percent-comp...
- twox2 5y ago
  I'm glad the mandates are being lifted. They no longer serve purpose. Maybe they did for a brief moment, but now there's little benefit to the greater good by imposing vaccines that don't do much to curb the spread.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Personally, this pandemic strongly illuminated why the United States is on its path to a failed social fabric, the likelihood of turning the ship around (low), and personally, that a large proportion of my fellow citizens/residents are not "my people" (the collective "us" versus "me, me, me"); it solidified my plans to expatriate somewhere with stronger social fabric and support of a shared common/greater good. More power to those who stick around while Rome burns.

telchior 5y ago

Could you explain a bit about what lead to the emotional harm? I'm not sure if it was the threatening email or not -- if the email had been as non-threatening as possible, yet a mandate was still put in place, would you have felt the same or not? (And what exactly was in the email?)

VancouverMan 5y ago
Any unwanted medical procedure, regardless of what exactly that procedure entails, is a form of bodily molestation and bodily violation. We should expect somebody being coerced by an authority figure to undergo an unwanted medical procedure, especially when that individual's livelihood is being threatened, to find it to be an emotionally traumatic experience, regardless of how severe the coercion is. The situation can easily be made worse when the procedure may have unknown harmful side effects, and when it comes out of the blue.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
I can only speak for myself, but it certainly impacted my relationship with my employer. Aside from it feeling intrusive into my personal health choices, It seemed to be an extreme ultimatum that reframed the power dynamic and how they valued me as an employee. An apt analogy would be if your husband/wife threatens divorce because you left socks on the floor. Even if you don't mind picking them up, or were planning to already, it is shocking and damaging that they would go straight to the nuclear option. Flip-flopping on the issue almost makes it worse. If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  > If you were willing to fire/divorce me yesterday, and don't care about the issue today, how much do you really value me and our ongoing partnership they never cared. You can like your job, you can love it. You can feel valued and like you contribute but its just a job, and they will drop you faster than you'll drop them.