They aren't proving it is the right thing to do to force your employees to save their own lives. I'd be willing to bet that in the same time period the airlines that don't have a vaccine mandate also had zero deaths and zero hospitalizations among their vaccinated employees (or very close due to others having more employees).
I'm basing this on the statistics for vaccinated people in general and the fact that the most at risk to be hospitalized or die if they are vaccinated are normally not employed at an airline.
Other employees being vaccinated is not saving the lives the vaccinated employees. If those 8-10 employees wanted to choose to risk death from COVID it isn't the place of their employer to force them not to take the risk.
I'm not sure what the total number of employees at United is right now after the COVID staffing adjustments. I've seen numbers of 74k to 88k.
Using the high number for lives saved and the low number for head count, their policy has saved the lives of 0.014% of their workforce. Meanwhile, using the high number for head count, 3.4% of the work force is currently COVID positive.
There could be a justification for the mandate if it prevented infections so that their operations weren't affected. However, 3.4% of the workforce currently can't work so the "right thing to do" isn't really helping their operation.
As I said in another post, I think they are being misleading with the "more than one" employee dying per week prior to the vaccine mandate. They are not very specific on how they are calculating which leads me to believe they are including the time period before vaccines were even available to calculate the average.
A very large percentage of their employees were vaccinated voluntarily before they mandated it. They estimated it at "no more than 70%" before they implemented the mandate. Using the 88k head count, that would mean that somewhere around 27k were not vaccinated. I find it hard to believe statistically that more than one of the 27k were dying per week given the age and health demographics of airline employees. Pilots are required to retire at 65 and you don't see too many flight attendants that keep working past that age. Certainly the employees in the physical jobs out on the ramp or in maintenance typically retire younger than that.
Either way, if they think it is "the right thing to do" to force their employees to protect themselves from dying of COVID, isn't it "the right thing to do" to not allow any employee to smoke? Shouldn't they have a mandatory BMI limit to work for United? The slope gets really slippery really quickly when you adopt the nanny mentality.
