In the interest of remaining anonymous, I am going to be sort of vague, but this did in fact happen this week:
I work at a health system, we are naturally short staffed. Said health system has made it very clear to existing employees that they want to hire more employees and reduce the number of contract or travel individuals we have on our payroll because it is “too expensive” for the health system. This week we hired 5 new employees. At the time of on boarding 2 of the 5 had not been vaccinated but were immediately compliant and received their 1st dose of an mRNA vaccine at onboarding, they needed this job they said. They have worked 2 days and I just got a call from one of those new hires that recently received a vaccine. She said she was informed by HR that after 3/21 (I am writing this on 3/16) she will be taken off the schedule for 3 weeks until she is able to receive her 2nd dose of the vaccine, because of the vaccine mandate. She said she was not informed of this ahead of time (I’m positive shes right) and that she had already put in and completed her two-weeks at her old job so she could come to work here. She is a single mom and will now have to go 3 weeks without a paycheck. I reached out to HR about this because I’m wondering why the hell was this not made clear in the initial offer and what we are going to do about it. The answer ~Nothing~, pretty much that its too bad so sad for her. No wonder no one want to work for healthcare systems. This specific health system also wonders why employee turn over is so high
I want to add: I am not upset with the vaccine mandate, I am upset with how management chose to handle the hiring and go about this situation. I have mentioned before that because of the mandate we are bound to, new hires need to be made abundantly clear of it, before extending an offer of employment. Also, said woman says she did not vaccinate sooner because she was pregnant and recently (in the last 6 months) gave birth. She said she had a history of miscarriage and her last child was stillborn, so she delayed vaccination because she was genuinely scared of losing another child. The Vaccines do in some case cause irregular periods or spotting for a time so I understood her concerns.