Seems like a pretty easy distinction to me.
And in construction if you refuse PPE your fired
However, the kind of people who do safety for unreasonable employers (usually process driven BigCos, mines and shipyards are good examples) and the kinds of people who's only exposure to industrial environments is the mandatory safety training they took once upon a time for their internship tend to dominate internet discussions about PPE and safety. This results in some real gems of insanity.
Safety culture is super hard to build, taking years of collaboration between management, workers, and unions if applicable. Every group wants nothing more than for the employees to go home the same way they went to work.
Any one time you do a task with less than required PPE, probably nothing will happen. But over the course of a career, those "this one time" instances add up and eventually will cause an injury or death.
The largest demographic experiencing heat issues in the shipyard are younger than 40.
Sure, there can and will always be one-in-a-million outliers. But that's true about anything, including wearing a helmet.
I assume they could if they felt it was important enough. And, for all I know, some hospitals may.
And there are employers that require flu shots, especially in the healthcare/long term care industries. Hell, many (most?) public schools and universities require certain vaccinations to be allowed to attend.
- require routine drug testing, even for drugs that are legal in your state
- require routine credit checks
- mandate attire standards
- dictate grooming standards
- require employees to routinely expose themselves to hazardous materials
- require travel to hazardous locations
- perform duties that are known to result in serious injury or loss of life
- require vaccines for things like the flu
- require employees to sit still in front of a computer for 8+ hours at a time, for months on end.
The remedy in the US for people who do not like these factors is to not work for employers that have different tolerances for physical safety than does the employee. I don't see how conditioning employment on receiving a vaccination for Covid is materially more dangerous than requiring an employee to work on sea-based drilling rig or in a coal mine.
That said, I do not think that vaccination is an unreasonable requirement.
It's absolutely how it works, because the labor laws we have don't generally prohibit requiring vaccinations, especially where that mitigates danger to yourself, other employees, or the public that come from you doing your job. Lots of jobs require certain vaccinations now.
> If vaccines can be mandated by companies where to draw the line?
Typically, at conditions which unreasonably endanger workers or the public, not ones that protect them.
"Something like Covid" is exactly the sort of disease that should be vaccinated against. The only reason why this is being done at an employer level rather than at a government level is because the federal government under the previous administration plugged its ears and refused to acknowledge the severity of the disease.
But more importantly, Covid is not the flu, and comparisons start failing pretty quickly. Not only do more people die of Covid, but more people have long-lasting symptoms, life-altering, after their infection.
If you don't want to, don't work for someone that requires it. It might severely limit your employment prospects, but that is your choice (obviously, exceptions should be made for those that cannot get it for medical reasons. They do not have choice).
We regard our bodies as our own possessions, and something like a vaccination is a potentially irreversible change to our body (etc.).
This is not an argument to say bodily sovereignty shouldn't be "ignored" here, only that it is a different case.
EDIT: anyone want to explain the downvote?
Forced medication is not the same as forced clothing choice so your argument is technically a strawman.