An August Willis Towers Watson poll found that 52% of 961 surveyed companies intend to implement at least one vaccine mandate by 2021’s fourth quarter. In a poll in May, 72% of respondents said they had no plans to require vaccines.
To encourage vaccination, some employers—like Delta Air Lines—are introducing or considering company healthcare plan surcharges for unvaccinated employees. However, in this article published via Advisory Board, McDermott Partner Judith Wethall said few employers have actually “pulled the trigger” on such a move.
Telemedicine in the United States is facing an important crossroads. While telehealth services have demonstrated their value as an integral part of care delivery, federal and state waivers instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to expire soon. As lawmakers and agency officials consider updated or expanded digital health rules, regulators are expected to intensify their scrutiny of providers.
Research continues to shed light on COVID-19’s long-term health effects for some people, and these “post-COVID conditions” will create additional challenges for employers.
In this Law360 article, McDermott partner Carole A. Spink says employers should be aware that long-haul COVID symptoms mean additional accommodations for employees.
“As they have done throughout the pandemic, employers should have a plan for addressing potential long-term absences as a result of post-COVID effects. On the practical side, at some point employers may need to determine whether a particular situation has become such that providing a continuing reasonable accommodation would pose an undue burden,” Spink notes.
The full US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine has led to vaccine mandates by both governments and businesses. More companies will implement their own vaccine requirements in light of the FDA approval, according to McDermott partner Michelle Strowhiro in this The Hill article.
“What employers are trying to balance right now is implementing the right safety standards for their workforce while also being cognizant of the fact that the labor market is so difficult and many employers are already struggling with having the right number of people on staff,” Strowhiro said.
Employers are facing a myriad of decisions as they consider vaccination requirements for their workforces.
Mandatory vaccine policies, for example, should include rationale for why they are required, McDermott partner Carole A. Spink said in this Society for Human Resource Management article. The scope of any policy should be clearly identified and explain which employees it applies to.
As the Delta variant continues to spread across the United States, companies are once again having to make tough decisions. In this Forbes article, McDermott partner Michael Peregrine says corporate boards should ask their CEOs how they will respond to the pandemic’s latest development.
“At a time when most businesses were aggressively moving forward with long-stalled resiliency measures, they are countered by the equally aggressive Delta variant,” Peregrine writes.
How should the federal and state governments approach remote work taxation? In this Law360 article, McDermott partner Kathleen Quinn says the growing complexity of remote work highlights the need for guidance.
“What’s becoming even more problematic is now, we don’t just have people that work in a New York office and they traditionally work from home from New Jersey,” Quinn said. “Now, people are saying, ‘Well, I’m going to work from New Jersey, then in the winter I’m going to work from Florida…and then maybe for a month I’ll go to Europe.’ It really becomes sort of a withholding mess.”
Recent US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance, for example, confirmed what employment lawyers had already been counseling businesses to do, according to McDermott partner Carole A. Spink in a recent Law360 article.
“The guidance was important because it did clarify that employers can provide incentives for voluntary programs. [There] was a big open question about, ‘Am I going to get into trouble because I’m trying to incentivize people to be vaccinated?'”
The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed how governments confront issues as varied as global taxation, emigration and real estate. In this article published in Law.com, McDermott partner Nicholas Holland contributes his insight into these trends (and others) that are sweeping across Hong Kong, the United States, the United Kingdom and the Cayman Islands.
As employees begin to return to their offices, human resource teams are being inundated with accommodation requests. The reasons behind these requests include:
Concerns about COVID-19 exposure;
Convenience of working from home;
Lack of child care options and costs of care; and
Weariness of daily commute.
McDermott’s Laurie Baddon says in an article published in SHRM that employers should share their policies with their workforces well in advance to give HR and legal teams time to process and assess accommodation requests.
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