Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good Friday morning, everyone. If you're going back to work in person after doing it from home during the pandemic or if you are an employer calling others back to work, here are two news stories from the last day that probably caught your eye. One is from Goldman Sachs here in New York. Did you see this? The New York Times reported they had a noon deadline yesterday for all employees to disclose their vaccination status. The Wall Street giant wasn't requiring people to get vaccinated, but it was requiring them to disclose their status by noon yesterday.

The other story is from Methodist Hospital in Houston, where they suspended 178 workers for not being vaccinated. The hospital is actually requiring vaccinations for its employees. They do have a religious and medical exemption policy, but these 178 suspended employees did not get those exemptions. They didn't qualify for whatever reasons. Basically, everybody at that hospital, and I read they have 25,000 employees, has to get a shot or get suspended and risk losing your job. You could see why all healthcare facilities might want to be the first to require COVID vaccines for the workers, but many do not.

In fact, a shockingly large minority of frontline healthcare workers are declining vaccines. That's been another story, but this hospital in Houston as a facility is requiring them. There are two stories. One, workplace requiring vaccines, another requiring at least disclosure of vaccination status. The question we will ask now is what should employers be doing about vaccine requirements or vaccine disclosures? We have a guest we'll bring on in just a minute, but we'll also open the phones right away today. Here are a few questions that you might want to weigh in on.

Is anyone listening right now who works at Goldman Sachs? Do you support the disclosure policy, and how's it going down among your other colleagues? You don't have to use your real name, but if you work at Goldman Sachs, we'd love to hear from you. 646-435-7280, 646-435-7280. Is anyone listening who works in any other workplace that's requiring either vaccination disclosure or vaccination itself? Do you support that policy? How's it going down among your colleagues? 646-435-7280 or maybe just as controversially, even though these new stories weren't exactly about this, is anyone listening who works someplace that is not asking employees their vaccination status?

If that's you, how do you feel about that? Do you support that policy and how is that going down among your colleagues? Maybe people want to know. 646-435-7280. Also, if your employer isn't asking, do you feel comfortable asking colleagues of yours at work about their vaccination status, individual to individual? Do you feel comfortable with people asking you about yours? All these questions are in play in workplaces right now. People are trying to sort this all out in another complicated transitional moment in the pandemic. 646-435-7280.

Finally, we would love to hear from employers or maybe HR managers or anyone who asked to actually make this decision, how are you making the decision whether to require vaccination, require vaccination status disclosure, or neither of the above? Once you know your employees' vaccination status, then what do you do about it? How hard are these decisions for you as employers at 646-435-7280? To recap, rollcall, Goldman Sachs employees, check-in. You okay with disclosure? Anyone from a company requiring actual vaccination? Are you okay with that?

Would you ask a colleague about their vaccination status or be okay if someone asks you? Employers or HR folks, how are you making these decisions about your company policy? 646-435-7280. Joining us to help talk through these workplace choices is Robert Iafolla, labor and employment law reporter for the news and information site, Bloomberg Industry Group. Robert, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Robert Iafolla: Thanks for having me, Brian.

Brian: Oh, and by the way, folks, I should say, you can also tweet your quick story or comment or question as always @BrianLehrer. Robert, let's start with Goldman Sachs. According to the BBC, Goldman Sachs, US Bankers were ordered to disclose their COVID vaccine status ahead of a return to the office by noon yesterday. One, is that clearly legal? Two, is it now common or unusual among big corporations?

Robert: It's legal, although there are some strings attached for the employer. They do need to keep that information confidential. The Americans with Disabilities Act has some confidentiality requirements when it comes to medical information, so they can go ahead and ask and get that information, but then they got to keep it confidential. I'm not exactly certain how common this practice is at this point in the stage of the pandemic, but you could imagine how it might be in a lot of workplaces.

Brian: You said some of them feel they have to keep it confidential. What will they do with the information? At the ballparks and sports arenas now, they have separate sections. Have you seen this? For vaxxed and non-vaxxed fans? Can Goldman Sachs have unvaxxed sections for stockbrokers?

Robert: Yes, they have the legal authority to segregate workers by vaccination status legally. There might be some employee relations issues with that sort of policy. I have chatted with some employment lawyers who consult management and some of them have said that would be a pretty terrible idea for employee relations perspective, but-- [crosstalk]

Brian: It depends which employees. Doesn't it depend which employees? If I'm a vaccinated employee, maybe I don't want my unvaccinated employees wandering around in my midst not having to disclose their status to me and being able to mingle.

Robert: Yes. You could imagine an employee might have those feelings. Ultimately, employees don't control the workplace.

Brian: Right, but that would be the majority of employees I would imagine at Goldman Sachs, those who have chosen vaccination.

Robert: Presumably, yes.

Brian: They have rights, too. According to the memo that was leaked to the New York Times, the bank had said staff in the US could work in the office without a mask if they had been vaccinated. I'm curious if you have reporting yet, Robert, on how common that policy is becoming as far as you can tell? Vaxxed employees can go unmasked in the office, unvaxxed employees have to wear masks.

Brian: I'm not exactly certain how common that policy is, but it does track with the CDC recommendations, where they eased the guidance as far as the need for a mask indoors and whatnot. When the CDC eased their guidance, you saw a bunch of states go ahead and roll back their mask mandates. The CDC is, "If you're vaccinated, you don't need a mask. If you're unvaccinated, you need to mask." That seems to be the baseline that a lot of Americans operating on right now.

Robert: Let's take a phone call. Michelle in Bridgeport. You're on WNYC. Hi, Michelle. Thanks for calling in.

Michelle: Hi, Brian, thank you so much for taking my call. I love your show.

Brian: Thank you.

Michelle: I work at a nonprofit, and one of the things that we do is run a culinary training program. That's a 10-week program. I have to say that listening to your guest is only increasing my anxiety about how little we know about what we're supposed to be doing, but one of our main concerns and why we're going to be requiring disclosure from the participants in our program is because of quarantine. We're trying to figure out what the requirements are in terms of who has to quarantine, if somebody test positive for COVID, and from what I read, and I would love for guests to weigh in on this.

Those who are vaccinated don't have to quarantine and those who are unvaccinated do, so to know who we have to send home and for how long is very confusing for us. That's why we are looking to ask for disclosure. I can certainly take the answer off the air.

Brian: Michelle, are you asking the employees who are disclosing to you to disclose to each other?

Michelle: That's the thing. We haven't even figured that piece out yet, where it's kind of the wild west here. My understanding was is that we weren't required in terms of HIPAA to keep it private, but maybe we're not doing things properly. I don't know. Certainly, different staff members have to know because we have to know who, like I said, to send home and who to cover for if they're gone for a week or 10 days or whatever it might be.

Brian: Do you have any policy about whether employees can ask their colleagues?

Michelle: No, we don't.

Brian: Anything like that Goldman Sachs masking an unmasking requirement, if you're unvaccinated you have to mask?

Michelle: We're actually asking everybody to mask if they're not in their offices. Then when they're in their offices or others are coming in, if they're vaccinated, they don't have to wear their masks.

Brian: Michelle, thank you so much. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Michelle: It's Wild West. We're all just trying to figure-- I was just saying throughout this pandemic, honestly, with everything, it just feels like there's no clear guidance on how to do anything that we're supposed to be doing.

Brian: It's so complicated. It's been all the way along. That's exactly right. Robert, can you do anything to reduce Michelle's anxiety?

Robert: Yes. There's seems to be hands-off approach as far as the government is not want to mandate a lot of rules around this. OSHA just released a temporary standard I believe that applies to the healthcare setting just recently. Generally speaking, in an office like a nonprofit, the employer's going to have a lot of leeway as far as what policy they want to develop in terms of quarantining, in terms of queries about vaccination these sort of things.

There are baselines. There are legal floors. Things you can, and can't do. Again, I had mentioned earlier the ADA is what creates that privacy protections in the workplace. For an employer, it's not going to be HIPAA it's going to be the ADA. The employer has a lot of leeway to establish rules. If they don't want coworkers to share their vaccination status, they can create rules around that. That's the bottom line. Is that most private employers have a lot of leeway.

Brian: Clear one thing up for me about HIPAA, which you mentioned in which the caller mentioned, isn't HIPAA only between doctors and their patients. That is the HIPAA privacy requirements, that law known as HIPAA, requires doctors to keep patient information confidential. It has nothing to do with employers and employees.

Robert: That's generally correct. HIPAA extends a little more broadly when it comes to other insurance entities, other entities in that healthcare relationship. That's absolutely right that HIPAA is not going to be the thing that creates any restrictions or creates any rights when it comes to the employer, employee relationship.

Brian: Laura in The Bronx you're on WNYC. Hi, Laura. Thanks for calling in.

Laura: Hi, I work in a healthcare facility in Queens and there are requirements for wearing masks, of course, but in terms of vaccination, there is no requirement. There's an encouragement, but no requirement that the workers be vaccinated. I just find that really worrisome if I were a patient or a loved one of a patient and I'm coming into a facility and I don't know who's vaccinated and who's not. Unless, of course, someone is immunocompromised or there's a religious exemption, I'm backing what that large healthcare facility did in Texas.

Brian: In Texas requiring everybody to get vaccinated. What is your employer at your healthcare facility say for why they're not going that far if they're saying anything?

Laura: Well, I suspect they're treading cautiously similar to what your speaker and everyone has said. I can't speak for them. I'm just suspecting that they don't want the kind of reaction. There's a lot of encouragement, of course. The union is certainly encouraging their members. Everybody's working together to encourage people, but they're not going to take that next step. Which is interesting because sometimes when someone comes in for a surgery, for example, certain patients are required to get at least a COVID test, not necessarily the vaccination, but a COVID test. If you're going to require it of certain patients, why wouldn't you require it of the employees who are going to service those patients?

Brian: What do you do under these circumstances as a healthcare worker in a facility and you're vaccinated, but you don't know what other people's status is? Do you just treat everybody as potentially contagious?

Laura: Oh, yes. I think in a lot of settings, of course, we wear the mask. If you're treating someone clinically, you're going to wear a mask as well as a shield. I think the rules for healthcare facilities, thankfully, are a little bit stronger. When you come into a facility, you're going to see all the employees with masks, plus they're perhaps in a room by themselves, then the mask can come off or they're in a nonclinical setting where there's no patient interaction. Even then you have to wonder, "Well, who's vaccinated, who's not?"

Brian: Laura, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Good luck out there. On the front lines in the healthcare world. If you're just joining us, listeners, we're talking about different companies like Goldman Sachs requiring disclosure of employees' vaccination status. Some like Methodist Hospital in Houston now requiring vaccinations, but many others not. Here's Lynn in Queens who works at Goldman Sachs. Lynn, thanks so much for checking in with us. Hi there?

Lynn: Yes. Hi, good morning. Thanks so much for taking my call.

Brian: How'd this go down yesterday? Do you think pretty much everybody disclosed their vaccination status to the company by noon as they were supposed to do?

Lynn: I do. They had requested it a little while ago now. We've had quite a bit of time. This isn't news. It's not like they told us the morning of, "Hey, we need to know it right now." Everyone I've spoken to, all of my colleagues have gotten vaccinated and have had no problem disclosing that and think that it's best for the firm and their return to work policy.

Brian: You're not hearing a lot of controversy around this. Then, what does it seem to you like they're doing with the information? Are they already separating or planning to separate vaccinated from unvaccinated employees or any other response to this?

Lynn: They are maintaining a mask policy for unvaccinated individuals. I have heard that any town halls or forums or events that take place in person, they are setting aside a separate section for vaccinated individuals so that they can assure that those are the folks that can be unmasked. They are doing some things to separate us.

Brian: How's the vibe among employees in terms of being able to ask each other or if you even want to ask each other individually your vaccination status? It's one thing for the employer to know, maybe in the HR department, it's another thing for you to know about the people you're working side by side with.

Lynn: It's a pretty tight community, I guess if you can say that. It's come up naturally as far as my interactions have gone. It's, "Oh, my gosh. Did you get vaccinated?" "Yes, I did. Oh, I had my second appointment. Oh, yay." I mean that quite literally. Everyone around me has said that's come up naturally. Now there have been some meetings with individuals who might be on a different floor or a different part of the office where I'm not at very frequently and that gets a little murkier. It's usually just as they're entering your area if they come in close proximity to you, are they wearing a mask or not? And you gauge their reaction and you don't outright ask, but you're trying to read each other. It gets a little fishy.

Brian: Lynn, thank you so much for checking in with us. We really, really appreciate it. Robert Iafolla from Bloomberg Industry News, it sounds at least that one caller like Goldman Sachs is a pretty functional workplace right now.

Robert: Yes. That's right. It doesn't necessarily need to be a combative situation. For a lot of people getting vaccinated is really good news and it doesn't necessarily need to be a fight.

Brian: I wonder if you're getting any indication yet as a reporter of how much conflict the masking policy like the one at Goldman Sachs would be causing, vaccinated employees don't have to wear masks, unvaccinated employees do because I tend to think the same people who won't get vaxxed are often the same people who declare it's their right not to wear a mask.

Robert: I suppose it matters the workplace. If you have a collegial workplace, there's things that we're asked to do at work that we wouldn't necessarily want to do in our private life. We understand we need to wear the uniform, we need to-- We're at work so you could imagine that somebody might not enjoy wearing a mask, but they also probably enjoy working and getting a paycheck or at least the getting the paycheck part.

Brian: All right. We'll continue this in a minute Heather in Park Slope vaccinated, but with some workplace dynamics, we see you'll be next. Jessica and Newark, Delaware who works at a bank that's not Goldman Sachs, we see you you'll be after that. Stay with us. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC. If you're just joining us we're having a call in and some reporting on the news stories that Goldman Sachs required all its employees to disclose their vaccination status by noon yesterday and A big hospital in Houston has suspended 178 employees for not getting vaccinated. So there are vaccination disclosure requirements at some companies, vaccination requirements at some other companies, and of course, a lot less than either of those at a lot of other companies.

We're getting your stories of how these are playing out at your workplace under any of these circumstances. Helping us with this is Robert Iafolla labor and employment law reporter for the news and information site Bloomberg Industry Group. Heather in Park Slope you're on WNYC. Hi, Heather. Thanks so much for calling in.

Heather: Hi, Brian. Long-time listener first-time caller. I'm not having any kind of issue in the workplace with this vaccination status, but I've been really interested kind of waiting for this whole moment to roll out to see how companies are going to deal with it. I did get vaccinated and we do require for-- We do a lot of photoshoots. We require testing or [unintelligible 00:23:02] I don't really want to have to disclose my vaccination status to my employer.

Brian: You are vaccinated, but you don't want to disclose it, how come?

Heather: I just don't like this feeling of being obligated to share my health information with my employer. I feel like it's a slippery slope. At the same time I feel like obviously there are industries, I think about nursing homes, and I think obviously, you would want to require your employees to be vaccinated. [unintelligible 00:23:42] absolute or makes perfect sense to me, but I still just-- I don't like the idea. If I have to share the status and I will, but I would rather not.

Brian: What about for your colleagues who've chosen so far not to get vaccinated, do you feel that your employer perhaps should know about them. Obviously, you don't because you just said that. Do you feel that it would protect you if they did?

Heather: I certainly feel like we need to be able to protect all of the people in our company. I guess that maybe people could do so by sending in test results then that might be sufficient. I guess generally if I'm vaccinated then I'm protected for myself and so I'm less concerned about my colleagues who might not be.

Brian: Heather, thank you so much for calling in we really appreciate it. Robert, she brought up testing, which has fallen out of the conversation, I guess vaccination is considered so protective now not only for incoming but that you don't spread COVID very easily even if you're infected and asymptomatic with it, that what we used to talk about a lot like requiring tests every few days or having the option of either showing that you're vaccinated or showing that you've been recently tested. The whole testing piece of this is falling away is that your sense at workplaces, in general?

Robert: I think that's right. I imagine that testing could still play a role. Yes, like you said, early pandemic it was all about testing because we didn't have these vaccines. Maybe testing would play a more prominent role now if these vaccines weren't so effective, but we've gone all-in on vaccines.

Brian: We're seeing that change at entertainment venues too where at Ballparks and sports venues here in New York, for example, at the beginning of reopening it was show proof of vaccination or your recent COVID test. The COVID test option has gone away now it's either show you're vaccinated and you can sit anywhere or don't show that you're vaccinated and you'll have to sit in special sections. The whole testing piece for entertainment venues is falling away too not everywhere but at those big sports venues at least which have been models for some things along these lines that is becoming the norm. Jessica in Newark, Delaware did I say it right? It's spelled like the city in New Jersey, but you say it differently, right?

Jessica: It's correct yes that's Newark that's how they say it here. I'm a transplant from New York area.

Brian: What's happening in Newark, Delaware?

Jessica: I work for a very large bank in a back-office capacity and what they're doing is-- Basically, they're following state guidelines and CDC guidelines, and if we are vaccinated and we declare that in the internal system, we don't have to wear a mask at all in the office. We can meet together in meeting rooms and groups and things like that. If you're not vaccinated you are supposed to wear a mask so, in essence, you can see who's not vaccinated, although some vaccinated people still choose to wear a mask. It's all over the place I guess.

Brian: Well, that's a different way to approach the same thing. If you want to go maskless in the bank you have to tell them that you're vaccinated.

Jessica: This is a back office, not retail, like no customer-facing. This is just an office.

Brian: Got it. That's right many people who are vaccinated who tend to be the more cautious people still might more tend to wear masks than people who are not vaccinated not to overgeneralize. You would have people in your office who are vaccinated, but not necessarily saying it because they're choosing to wear masks. You don't know which of your colleagues who's masked is vaccinated or unvaccinated?

Jessica: Correct. Unless, of course, they declare. People are pretty free when they are vaccinated, I think. The only thing we were questioning if you're not vaccinated and you don't wear a mask, who has access to that information to know? That was the only thing we were thinking about as a group like I was talking to some of my colleagues. It's the honor system I guess unless someone really wants to challenge it, I guess with HR. I don't know if that information would be exposed.

Brian: It would be up to the supervisor I suspect if somebody who reports to them is walking around at work unmasked then the supervisor asks, is that the way it's working?

Jessica: No they're not supposed to ask. That's the gray area. Is HR willing to disclose that information? I guess if someone declares, "I'm not vaccinated and I refuse to wear a mask," that's a different story, but if someone's not saying anything you really don't know 100%. There's no way to know. Other than I guess if you challenge it, if the supervisor wants to challenge it, and then escalate the issue with HR, but I don't know how frequently that would really happen.

Brian: Jessica, thank you so much for telling that story. Yet another gray area. Here's another health care worker. Terrence in Union County you're on WNYC. Hi, Terence.

Terrence: Hi. I work in a large hospital in New Jersey and I have not been vaccinated. The facility I work at is not requiring everyone to get vaccinated, but like another caller said they are very strongly encouraging it. My reasons for not being vaccinated are I have several health issues, one of which is an auto-immune disorder.

Brian: How's that going if they're not requiring you to disclose it? Officially, do you talk about this openly with your colleagues?

Terrence: I do not. In my department everybody's friendly enough, so everybody's asking everyone else in my department and if someone asks me, I don't really have a problem saying, "No, I haven't been," but then you get the weird looks and people asking you why not and then it starts to go into now, I'm having to disclose my reason and my private health information.

Brian: The Houston hospital that's requiring all their employees to get vaccinated, it is with the exception for certain health conditions and religious views. You might be officially exempt if you were there. Do you know why your employer in a healthcare setting isn't requiring vaccination except for people like you?

Terrence: I'm not sure. I don't know exactly why, but I heard another caller say that I think they're just being cautious about it at the moment. I feel like there's going to come a point when at least in healthcare, they're going to be requiring it for everyone. I just hope when it gets to that point that I don't have trouble trying to explain or whatever.

Brian: To prove your medical exemption. Do they require flu shots at your place normally?

Robert: They do. I think most and all of healthcare they probably require that except for like you said before if you have some type of valid exemption.

Brian: Thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate it. Good luck at work. Robert Iafolla from Bloomberg Industry Group as we start to wrap this up, on that Houston hospital story, do you know if many hospitals or other healthcare workplaces are requiring employee vaccination and suspending those who don't comply because what we've heard from our several callers who work in healthcare facilities around here, it sounds like that's not the norm.

Robert: My reporting, Houston Methodist Hospital is out in front on this. There's a little bit of additional information about that situation down there. You have 26,000 workers, the hospitals the hospital claims that 99% of the people have gotten vaccinated. Some of the 1% have sued the hospital to challenge the vaccine mandate. There's a lot of employers that as you've heard from some of your colleagues are not yet mandating because there's a lot of-- I don't want to be flip about it and say just headaches about it.

There's a lot of complications that employers have to deal with, the legal requirements for exemptions. These are long-shot lawsuits, but the potential of getting sued and then you can have 1% of your workforce that makes a lot of trouble.

Brian: It's a path of least resistance right now to not require. Final question, what about flu shots and the history of requiring those as a baseline for this, is it your understanding that they are-- I know one place in New York where they require flu shots or you have to go masked at work and that's before the pandemic, is there an industry standard?

Robert: There's nothing new about vaccine requirements in the workplace particularly in healthcare, whether it be influenza, measles, mumps, rubella, some of these infectious diseases. The way that employers are handling healthcare [unintelligible 00:34:50], in particular, handling COVID it differs.

Brian: Robert Iafolla, labor and employment law reporter for the news and information site, Bloomberg Industry Group. Thanks so much for coming on today. We really appreciate it.

Robert: Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up next, which debate did you watch last night? Stay with us.

 

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