As thousands of Americans remain locked out of their careers despite the lift of the federal vaccine mandate due to the continued enforcement of state and private sector Covid-19 vaccine mandates, on May 18, 2023, the 127th year anniversary of the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson – wherein the US Supreme Court declared on May 18, 1896 that separate and unequal facilities for African-Americans was constitutional, the U.S. Supreme Court will vote in private conference on whether to rule on the merits of an Emergency Application that asks the Court to forever ban vaccine mandates by any public or private employer, which have caused cause millions of employees to be separated from their jobs based on their unvaccinated status.
The emergency application submitted by the Women of Color For Equal Justice (WOC4EJ), a Maryland non-profit advocacy center on behalf of New York City employees, asks the Court to declare that all vaccine mandates by public and private sectors are illegal and where unauthorized when enacted and enforced because they violate the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) minimum safety standards as well as the Free Exercise and substantive Due Process clauses of the Constitution. Unlike the many cases around the country that sought to declare various vaccine mandates unconstitutional based on their “unequal or discriminatory application” against employees wherein some employees were granted exemptions and many were not, Jo Saint-George, Founder and Chief Legal Officer of WOC4J, argues that “all vaccine mandates have been illegal since at least 1970 when the OSH Act was enacted by Congress, which at that time was one of the most important pieces of “human rights” legislation for workers in America.”
OSHA Protects The Right To Refuse Any Vaccine
The OSH Act expressly protects the First Amendment Free Exercise right of all employees to refuse any immunization or vaccine based on religious grounds and the OSH Act also bans any person or employer from terminating or removing an employee from their job or a person from a public place based on their refusal to be vaccinated.
The OSH Act provides everyone employee an “automatic exemption” from any vaccination (a.k.a immunization) based on religious grounds because there is nothing in the statute that authorizes employers to demand employees to prove their religious beliefs nor are employees required to provide a letter from their clergy before the exemption is to be granted. When congress enacted the ”automatic religious exemption” in Section 20(a)(5) of the OSH Act no exemption pre-conditions was included and courts are to strictly interpret the statute based on its plain language and no employer can add or subtract from the language of the statute.
Women of Color for Equal Justice – is a Maryland non-profit national advocacy affiliate of the Madison County Economic Development Corporation a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to eliminate structural and systemic barriers to equality and economic justice and development for communities of color around the country.