Clashes of values

A few weeks ago, I posted about struggles within organized labor about whether unions could support vaccine mandates by employers aiming to compel members to get their shots. 

Now that the Federal Drug Administration has fully approved the Pfizer shot, we're seeing headlines like this: 

 

Kind of puts the party of unrestricted business liberty for the rich in a bind, if big companies start demanding proof of inoculation from their workers, while the FoxNews-base howls about tyranny.

 

Today the national leader of the American Federation of Teachers explained to the Times' Kara Swisher how her union came around to working with school authorities toward universal vaccination. 

Randi Weingarten
... we operate as a democracy. If you believe that our job is to help make sure that schools are safe, which I believe it is, for our kids and for teachers and the rest of the education community, and you know that vaccines are the single most important way to do it, we got to a resolution, passed unanimously by our leadership, that said that we’ll work with employers, not oppose employers, on their vaccine requirements, including mandates. And what’s happened thus far is that that’s what everybody has done. You see California did it on a statewide basis. New Jersey is doing it on a statewide basis. New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago are doing it on local bases. Some of the vaccine policies have become vaccinate or test. Some of the vaccine policies are full vaccination with the exemptions of medical or religious, but at the same time, I get emails frequently from people who have told me that they will drop the membership if we endorse vaccine mandates. ...

Kara Swisher
Should teachers be required to approve [accept?] a vaccination if required? 

Randi Weingarten
There’s always this issue about privacy. Yes, I think that we should. I think that this is a community responsibility. And I think that the issue about distrust of the government authorities runs so deeply that there’s always this pushback. If I could do anything, if I had a magic wand, and I could do anything in life, it would be to try to recreate the trust in public schooling, the trust in government doing the right thing. I think the level of distrust and a sense of — this libertarian sense of freedom as opposed to the community social contract — the first class I ever taught when I taught as a school teacher at Clara Barton High School in New York City was about the Lockean social contract and that in a democracy, you give up some rights in order to make sure that you create community and the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

My emphasis added.

Unions aren't perfect. Far from it. But they are a kind of democracy, far more so than most workplaces. And their survival and the well-being of their membership depends on collective solidarity -- a healthy value in a pandemic and a democracy.