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Should Disney Require Its Employees To Be Vaccinated?
HughPickens.com writes According to Joanna Rothkopf Disneyland is already a huge petri dish of disease with tired children wiping their snot faces on Goofy and then riding log flumes through mechanized rivers filled with the backwash of thousands of other sweaty, unwashed, weeping toddlers. Now John Tozzi reports at Businessweek that five workers at Disneyland have been diagnosed with measles in an outbreak that California officials trace to visitors at the theme park in mid-December. The measles outbreak is a publicity nightmare for Disney and the company is urging its 27,000 workers at the park to verify that they're inoculated against the virus, and the company is offering tests and shots on site for workers who are unvaccinated. One thing Disney won't do, however, is require workers to get routine vaccinations as a condition of employment. Almost no companies outside the health-care industry do. "To make things mandatory just raises a lot of legal concerns and legal issues," says Rob Niccolini. Disney has been working with public health officials, and they've already put some employees on paid leave until medically cleared. "They recognized that they were just a meeting place for measles," says Gilberto Chávez. "And they are quite concerned about doing what they can to help control the outbreak."
Nearly all companies worth working for have drug testing requirements. So it's not as easy as "you don't have to work for them." You effectively can't work for anybody in entire swaths of industry for doing something that is so harmless, several states have decided to legalize it. Do companies check to make sure you aren't violating other laws? Certainly. Do they make you prove your innocence on a quarterly basis? Of course not. That only happens with drug use.
Some employers even have you sign agreements not to drink in public, drive 5 mph under the speed limit, stay under a certain weight, or my personal favorite-- back in to all parking spots. Let's not forget some companies (e.g. church schools) still fire people for being gay. My employer doesn't allow me to post negative comments about my company on forums. Should this shit be legal?
Seems to me that if a person is doing their job well, that a company shouldn't have the right to fire them. I live in an "at will" state. We can fire somebody because the sky is cloudy, and they can't do anything about it. That seems pretty fucked up to me.