Hospital Didn't Accommodate Flu-Shot Objectors On Staff, Must Pay $89,000

I’ve got the story at Overlawyered: 

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has announced that Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C. will pay $89,000 for failing to accommodate employees “who declined flu vaccinations based on their religious beliefs.” [EEOC press release] Mission had in fact agreed to exempt employees from the flu shot based on religious objections, but required that they declare their intention ahead of time. And that turned out to be not accommodating enough, since not requiring that extent of advance notice would not in the EEOC’s view have posed an undue hardship on the employer — hence the expensive lesson….

Under the elastic “undue hardship” standard, employers may face much uncertainty as to how much disruption of their business they must put up with in the name of accommodation. The flu-shot example suggests that risks to co-workers, customers, and the general public might sometimes enter the calculus as well — an expensive guessing game at best.

More about obligations of religious accommodation under federal law, including the elastic way they tend to shrink or expand these days based on the ideological uses to which they are put, at the link. Here, however, I’d like to make a different point. Libertarians take a lot of flak because some of our number criticize mandatory government vaccination as an infringement of principles of voluntary association (though many other self-described libertarians do not in fact take this view). But in the case of Mission Hospital – a private, not-for-profit institution – principles of voluntary association lead directly to the view that the hospital should be free to require such measures of its workforce, whether to avoid risks of direct contagion, to set a good example when urging patients to vaccinate, or from other rationales. Yet here the federal government deploys its full force to prevent private and voluntary social mechanisms from being brought to bear to get a potentially high-risk group to undergo vaccination. 

Flu season is not over and this year’s strain has proved particularly deadly, by the way, so please consider protecting your family and loved ones if you have not already. Details here and here.