In another instance of the Trump administration punishing companies for past demands that workers get vaccinated against COVID-19, Kaiser Permanente has agreed to pay $358,000 to resolve a dozen claims.
Under the second presidency of Donald Trump, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has sided with employees who lost their jobs or faced other consequences for not getting vaccinated in 2021 as the pandemic swept the world. Many of these complaints stem from employees who were denied religious exemptions from vaccine mandates.
Kaiser Permanente, a health care provider, did not admit liability but agreed to a conciliation agreement that includes holding religious accommodation trainings for employees and initiating a process through which it can address “reasonable religious accommodations” requested by workers.
Christine Park-Gonzalez
The administration’s position is a reversal of the attitude of the Biden administration and is a concession to the merger of the anti-vax community and the evangelical community that are important parts of Trump’s political base.
“The EEOC charges of discrimination alleged that Kaiser denied employees religious accommodations to the company’s vaccine mandate policy,” and found evidence the company violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act by questioning “the sincerity of employees’ religious beliefs and failing to provide religious accommodations as appropriate to employees at various locations in several states,” the EEOC said in announcing the agreement.
“We commend Kaiser for enacting corrective measures that will have a lasting impact on workers seeking religious accommodations in the workplace,” said Christine Park-Gonzalez, director of EEOC’s Los Angeles District. “Federal law requires that employers provide reasonable religious accommodations unless it poses an undue hardship that is substantial in the overall context of the employer’s business, and the EEOC will continue to enforce that all-important statue.”
The deal with Kaiser Permanente is the latest in a growing list of religion-related discrimination cases EEOC has pursued under the Trump administration and its commitment to pursuing “religious liberty” cases. By early May, the agency reported resolving 16 religious discrimination cases totaling $67 million in recovered funds. Most involved employee complaints around mandatory vaccine requirements dating back to COVID-19.
But more cases have been reported since then, including the May 18 announcement that an Oklahoma-based manufacturing company agreed to pay $4.2 million to more 40 workers terminated in 2021 for refusing to be vaccinated.
“When these workers asked for a simple religious accommodation, the company didn’t pause to listen or even consider the impact,” an EEOC attorney said at the time. “It fired every one of them outright — without a conversation and without any real inquiry into whether granting an accommodation would have caused the business any hardship at all. This is unlawful as well as unfair.”
Just over a week later, EEOC said it reached a $325,000 agreement with a Chicago-area hospital group on behalf of employees denied religious exemptions from vaccine mandates. The agency claimed the policy violated Title IV of the Civil Rights Act.
In March, the agency announced a $15 million settlement with a global electronics and computing firm charged with discriminating “against a class of employees on the basis of religion and disability by denying their COVID-19 vaccine exemption requests and terminating employees who declined to receive vaccines.”
In January, the National Partnership for Women and Families charged the Trump administration is using the EEOC “as a weapon against the workers it was designed to protect.”
Senior Fellow Tanya Goodman claimed the EEOC has reversed course on basic interpretations of law that are leaving women and transgender people vulnerable. Flipping the script on vaccine mandates also fits that pattern of undoing what Trump has called the “woke” policies of the Biden administration and weaponizing the federal government against his opponents.
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