Pirate's Cove

This probably won’t work all that well, since the police and most of the city workers are unionized. For a change, government unions actually comes into play in protecting employees from tyrannical employers. Also, I wonder how many with quit? The police can easily get another job in a city and state that values them

NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio threatens to withhold the paychecks of NYPD officers and other city workers who refuse weekly COVID-19 testing

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to withhold the paychecks of New York Police Department officers and other city workers who aren’t vaccinated for COVID-19 and refuse weekly testing.

Under a mandate enacted by de Blasio, all city workers must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or be tested for the disease weekly. The mandate goes into full effect on Monday, impacting about 340,000 city workers across various sectors.

“If someone, again, does not follow that mandate, that’s true, eventually, they’re not going to be paid, obviously,” de Blasio said in a press conference on Thursday.

As of this week, 53% of NYPD employees have received one dose of the vaccine, compared to about 79% of adults in New York City, according to data obtained by the Gothamist from the NYC department of health. Approximately 71% of adults in New York City are fully vaccinated. The NYPD has among the lowest vaccination rates of any city agency, the New York Times previously reported.

The Police Benevolent Association of the City of New York, the largest municipal police union in the world, has spoken out against the testing mandate because police officers will not be compensated for the time spent getting tested, something that was originally promised to them by the NYPD and City Hall, a spokesperson for the union told Insider.

Too be honest, that seems a silly reason. Police could certainly take some time during the shift to go get a shot or tested. It’ll cost them what, an hour, hour and a half? Most in the private sector do not get compensated, like they don’t get compensated for taking their work clothes to the dry cleaners and/or washing them themselves. Or driving to work.

In response to the mandate, the PBA is planning on filing a grievance with the city’s office of collective bargaining, an organization within the city’s government that regulates labor relations disputes and controversies with city employees, Lynch said.

Win or lose, a lot of police will leave the NYC force, to go with all the ones who’ve already left. And with rising crime, this won’t turn out well. I wonder, though, where’s the protection for the average citizen from Surrender Joe’s “mandate”? As for that, we’re seeing a lot of articles like

Law expert: Biden’s vaccine mandate constitutional, local companies wary

But there’s also a lot like

Biden’s Vaccine Mandate is Grossly Unconstitutional

Most of the pushers of vax mandates like to run with

While popular belief holds that government vaccine mandates have been constitutional ever since the United States Supreme Court upheld one in the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts decision, the Biden Administration clearly does not believe that it can simply order all those who are eligible to get vaccinated.  If it did, Biden would have used his address to announce a nationwide mandate.

The fact that he did not is very telling.  In Jacobson, the plaintiff, Henning Jacobson, refused to comply with Massachusetts’ mandatory smallpox vaccine because he “had been caused great and extreme suffering for a long period by a disease produced by vaccination” as a child.  The state fined him five dollars (the equivalent of about $150 today), and he sued.

The Court held that Massachusetts’ vaccine mandate was constitutional because “in every well-ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

17 years later, Jacobson was the precedent that led the Court to rule in Zucht v. King that the San Antonio Public School System could deny admission to students who had not received a smallpox vaccine.  In its ruling, the Court noted that Jacobson “had settled that it is within the police power of a state to provide for compulsory vaccination.”

Pretty cut and dry, right?  Not quite.  Five years after Zucht, the Court used the Jacobson ruling to uphold eugenics.  In an effort to prevent the “feeble-minded” from passing on their supposedly defective genes, Virginia in 1924 passed a law that allowed the mentally disabled to be forcibly sterilized “for the protection and health of the state.”

After all, reasoned Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, if a state can mandate vaccination for the good of society, why can’t it mandate sterilization for an equally noble goal?

Oops? Subsequent rulings and law did away with the notion of forced medical procedures for the “feeble-minded”, and

In upholding the ability of a prisoner to be injected with antipsychotic medication against his will, the Supreme Court noted in its 1990 decision in Washington v. Harper that “the forcible injection of medication into a nonconsenting person’s body represents a substantial interference with that person’s liberty.”

So, yeah, this isn’t cut and dry. And why companies with 100+ employees? Seems arbitrary. Does OSHA have the actual power? Time will tell.