(ETH) – After months of encouraging employees to get vaccinated against Covid-19, companies are beginning to take a harder line and roll out mandates — a dramatic escalation of Corporate America’s approach to halting the spread of the virus.
Momentum for vaccine mandates has been building, and President Joe Biden was expected on Thursday to announce a requirement that all federal employees and contractors be vaccinated or be required to submit to regular testing and mitigation requirements. On Wednesday, Google and Facebook became the first two Silicon Valley giants to issue mandates of their own.
Here are the companies that have announced Covid-19 vaccine requirements for at least some of their employees. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to staff Wednesday announcing a vaccine requirement for employees who are coming back to the office. The policy would roll out in the United States in the coming weeks and in other regions in the following months as vaccines become more widely available, Pichai said.
It’s not clear how Google plans to enforce the policy. All Facebook employees must get vaccinated before coming back to the office, the company announced Wednesday. “As our offices reopen, we will be requiring anyone coming to work at any of our US campuses to be vaccinated,” Lori Goler, Facebook’s VP of people said in a statement.
“We will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons and will be evaluating our approach in other regions as the situation evolves,” she added. Netflix is requiring Covid-19 vaccines for the casts of all its US productions, as well as the people who come in contact with them, according to Deadline.
Last week, Hollywood unions and major studios hammered out return-to-work protocols that include “the option to implement mandatory vaccination policies for casts and crew in Zone A” on a production-by-production basis. “Zone A,” consists of the actors and the people who come in close proximity to them. CONTINUE
