The New American Millions of Americans and U.S. companies will be impacted by the decision of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. On November 16, proceedings over the legality of the OSHA Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) took a step forward with the Sixth Circuit Court being assigned to the consolidated cases that have challenged the legal basis of the ETS. If the ETS goes into effect, companies with 100 or more employees will be involuntarily required to manage the vaccine status of all employees, ensuring full vaccination, or if they choose, allowing the unvaccinated to test weekly for COVID-19 and to enforce wearing a mask while in the workplace.
Two days after OSHA issued its controversial ETS, the Fifth Circuit Court “stayed” the ETS, ordering OSHA to “take no steps to implement or enforce [the ETS] until further court order.” Then, according to legal protocol, the Sixth Circuit Court was randomly chosen to hear the numerous consolidated challenges from across the nation. States, businesses, organizations, and institutions lined up to sue the federal government over this unconstitutional move and to halt this flawed attempt at vaccine coercion.
The Fifth Circuit Court did a brilliant job of poking holes in OSHA’s ETS, stating that it is both overinclusive and underinclusive. The overinclusive, “one-size-fits-all” nature of the mandate was criticized by the Court. As an example, a truck driver cruising along a desolate stretch of Montana highway does not experience the same risk of COVID infection from a co-worker as does a meatpacker crammed near multiple co-workers and throughout a long shift. OSHA failed to show, beyond the clusters of COVID exposure and transmission in some work environments, that there were findings of exposure in all covered workplaces. According to the Court, “The Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for the differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly “grave danger” the Mandate purports to address.”…
