Dive Brief:
Ascension Michigan has agreed to offer back pay to workers who sought religious exemptions from the health system’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate and were instead terminated or placed on indefinite leave.
The Monday settlement ends a multiyear legal battle over the COVID-era employment policy. Healthcare workers first sued Ascension in 2022, alleging the St. Louis-based health system violated their religious rights by not accommodating requests for exemptions.
Hospital vaccination mandates divided the industry during the peak of the pandemic, with many employers and workers supporting the policies for helping to reduce transmission rates. However, some fought mandates in court, arguing their narrow exemptions ignored the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Dive Insight:
In 2021, federal regulators required all health systems that received federal funding to ensure their workers were vaccinated against COVID. Hospital groups largely supported the policy, in part because the highly contagious Delta variant was peaking at the time, straining capacity. However, Republican lawmakers in more than a dozen states quickly challenged the mandates, calling it an overreach.
National roll out of vaccine requirements was paused several times as courts considered legal objections. Ultimately, the Biden administration abandoned the policy in 2023, stating that the COVID emergency had subsided.
Still, in the interim many health systems — like Ascension — issued vaccination policies of their own.
At Ascension, workers were told in July 2021 that they had until November to get vaccinated.
Over 4,500 Ascension employees sought religious accommodations and were denied — about 3% of the health system’s total workforce, according to employment figures available on Ascension’s website.
Some employees were insulated from disciplinary measures, according to plaintiff attorneys. For example, employees living in states like Alabama, Florida and Texas had measures to prevent employers from suspending workers over vaccine decisions. And in November 2021, the Oklahoma attorney general filed a lawsuit to prevent Ascension from firing employees who sought religious accommodations.
However, Ascension ultimately placed an estimated 3,000 employees on unpaid leave or fired them over their failure to get vaccinated, according to attorneys.
The settlement grants up to five weeks of back pay to those impacted workers — the total sum of which was not unspecified.
It is the latest example of courts granting payouts to workers who cite federal Civil Rights statutes in their decision not to get vaccinated. Earlier this year, a jury awarded a former Blue Cross Blue Shield employee a $680,000 settlement after determining she was wrongfully terminated following her decision not to get vaccinated.
