Alaska businesses largely pleased with Supreme Court scuttling federal vaccine requirements

Some Alaska business owners expressed relief this week after the U.S. Supreme Court halted a measure from the Biden administration that would have required employees of large businesses to get a COVID-19 vaccine or test regularly for the virus.

The ruling by the court’s conservative majority put a stop to an Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s rule that would have applied to businesses with at least 100 employees.

More than 80 million people would have been affected by the rule, including employees of close to 1,000 Alaska businesses — representing more than half of the workers in the state — according to Jon Bittner with the Alaska Small Business Development Center.

Without a federal mandate, companies are subject to a patchwork of state policies. While some states have limited businesses’ ability to implement their own vaccination requirements, employers in Alaska can decide for themselves whether to set vaccine and testing policies for employees.

Industry groups in Alaska said guidance on the rule was confusing and sometimes conflicting, and several said that while they continue to encourage people to get vaccinations, there were major problems with the federal mandate.

“We have always believed this is a decision for businesses to make,” said Kati Capozzi, president of the Alaska Chamber, which represents many of the state’s industries and businesses that stood to be covered by the mandate.

Capozzi said many mid-sized companies that employ just enough people to fall under the OSHA’s threshold of 100 workers do not have the resources to track employee vaccination and testing statuses, and worried that requirements would cause them to lose employees with the tight labor market.

“The worker shortage is real, particularly with construction and transportation,” Capozzi said. “Workers were threatening to leave if the mandate was enforced.”

The Chamber is strongly in favor of Alaskans getting vaccinated, and has put money behind incentive campaigns and vaccine promotion, believing protection from the virus is the best way to keep the state economy moving forward. But her organization does not support edicts from federal or state governments dictating how to manage health policies.

“It’s not appropriate to be told there’s a mandate, it’s not appropriate to be told you can’t have one,” Capozzi said.

Alaska was one of several Republican-led states that sued OSHA to block the rule. But it has not gone as far as other states in prohibiting any kind of vaccination requirement. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, 13 states have passed laws that ban mandatory vaccine provisions in one form or another.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy called Thursday’s decision “a huge victory for individual, business and states’ rights.”

“With that said, the State of Alaska will continue to make available vaccines, therapeutics and information for individuals to chart their own health decisions,” Dunleavy said in a statement Thursday.

In a separate ruling, the high court allowed the federal government to move forward with a vaccine mandate for health care workers that applies to employees in health care settings that receive federal Medicaid and Medicare funding. Alaska was among several states that had asked the Supreme Court to block this mandate. The state is also seeking to block vaccine requirements for federal contractors and Head Start employees. That mandate is on hold after lower courts blocked it.

“We continue to believe this intrusion into personal liberties shouldn’t be dictated by the federal government,” Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor said in a statement.

OSHA estimated that the rule would save 6,500 lives and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations across the U.S. over six months.

But many private businesses are pleased to be absolved of the need to track employees’ vaccination status.

The court’s ruling “was the best news I have gotten this entire year,” said Rob McKinney, chief executive for Ravn Alaska, the state’s largest rural airline with about 400 employees.

“I feel strongly about people’s individual right to choose about topics like what medications they put in their body,” he said.

Ravn now requires new employees to be fully vaccinated in order to be hired. Existing employees at the company are encouraged to be vaccinated, but not required. The requirement for new employees has made the hiring process difficult — McKinney estimated they lose 15%-20% of candidates over the vaccination requirement.

“It has been a major issue of concern for Alaska’s construction industry,” said Alicia Amberg, executive director of the Associated General Contractors of Alaska.

Amberg said the requirements offered inadequate guidance for employers, and at times rules in the separate mandates were even at odds.

“There were just a lot of questions and not as many answers.” Amberg said. “As an association, we’re not necessarily against vaccines or the mandates of vaccines, there just wasn’t a lot of guidance.”

Implementation for construction crews was especially vexing inside Alaska, which has a short, dense building season. Contracting outfits might bring on dozens or hundreds of workers for a project that lasts a few months, then shrinks to a skeleton crew over the winter. Would that, Amberg asked, put those businesses above or below the OSHA threshold?

Private companies are free to require employees to receive COVID vaccinations, and, Amberg said, many have. But few members of her association were enthusiastic about the blanket approach from the Biden administration.

Many businesses in the Alaska Support Industry Alliance, which include oil field and mining workers, already have strict testing requirements in place, according to Rebecca Logan, who runs the alliance.

“Working at remote sites on the North Slope, or in the Cook Inlet or at a mine has always required regular testing, even after vaccinations were prevalent in the workforce,” Logan wrote in an email, adding that companies had been preparing to comply with the mandate before the court ruling was issued.

The alliance represents about 500 companies, 200 of which are large enough to have been covered by the federal vaccination and testing requirement.

A number of local companies and national corporations with operations in Alaska did not respond to requests for comment, or declined to discuss their approaches to vaccination and testing policies in specific detail.

Alaska’s U.S. Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, welcomed the court’s decision while encouraging Alaska residents to get vaccinated.

“While I am fully vaccinated and encourage others to do the same, the federal government does not have the authority to mandate vaccinations,” Murkowski said in a statement.

Enforcement of the mandate was initially scheduled to begin Jan. 4, but was later delayed to Jan. 10, with a promise from OSHA that citations of companies regarding testing requirements would not begin before Feb. 9, giving companies time to adjust to the new requirements.

Earlier this week, the Chugach Electric Association rolled out its vaccine and testing compliance plan to its 460 employees, only for it all to be moot by Thursday’s court ruling.

“We had a policy written, we released it Monday to our employees,” said Chugach spokeswoman Julie Hasquet, who has been on the company’s pandemic response team for nearly two years.

“It’s been challenging to follow all of the guidance, to then gear up for this OSHA requirement, and then in a few days find out it was no longer going to be in effect,” Hasquet said. “It has been continually changing, especially as of late.”