Google has sent a statement to its employees in the United States in which warn to those who do not get vaccinated against COVID-19: from next month they will be suspended from employment and salary, and if they persist in their refusal to get vaccinated, they can get fired. It is the first technology to take this measure.
Company workers had until December 3 to notify management of their vaccination status, as well as to send the documentation they had as proof of vaccination. They could also request an exemption for medical or religious reasons. After that date, Google began contacting workers who had not updated their status or were not vaccinated, in addition to those who had not been granted the exemption. And those who do not comply with the vaccination regulations as of next January 18 will enter “paid administrative leave” for 30 days.
After that period, Google will decree that they enter “personal leave without pay” for a maximum of six months. If after that period they still do not comply with the vaccination regulations, they will be fired. It is the first and only technology company that has made the decision to force its employees to be vaccinated in the United States under threat of dismissal. He has also confirmed that he will ask his employees to return to his offices three days a week sometime next year. But for now without a specific date.
The Google CEO Sundar Pichai, already announced last July that the company would make vaccines mandatory for those who returned to the presence, which they planned to start this coming January. But in early December, the company has told employees that it is not yet asking them to return to their jobs. meanwhile, the mandate for vaccination for all has not been well received by several hundred workers at the company, who have issued a manifesto opposing it.
In other technologies, only vaccinated in the office
Until now, the strongest step that technology companies have taken in the United States towards vaccination was reserve access to its US offices only to employees who have been vaccinated. They did this at Cisco, Red Hat, Salesforce, Twitter or Uber, according to CNBC. So is Meta when it reopens its offices at the end of next January.
Until the beginning of December, practically all of them had implemented packages of measures aimed at combating increases in infections by making the vaccine mandatory, in line with the order given by Biden for a few weeks for employees of companies with more than 100 workers. All employees, without exception except for proven medical or religious reasons, were required to be vaccinated in order to remain in their jobs.
Only for now, the order is on hold: on December 7, a federal court issued an order to pause the federal executive order of the Biden Administration that required vaccination for the aforementioned workers, and which was to be applied from on January 4, 2022. Since then, many companies have modified their plans and stopped the mandatory vaccination order for their workforce, and many more are expected to do so in the near future. That is why it would not be surprising to see more technology companies, as well as companies from other sectors, request proof of vaccination to access their facilities.
But this is not the only complication for technology companies in the United States. The rebound in infections that is being experienced there, as in the whole world, together with the expansion of the Omicron variant, of which there is still no 100% concrete data, has led many to postpone their plans back to the presence, which had already been set for the first months of 2022 after several postponements. And also, to do it without a date. Others, who had already started opening their offices and returning their employees to them, although with limitations and part-time, have been forced to close their facilities again, for now with no opening date either.
The return to the presence, suspended again by Omicron
Besides Google, there are already several tech companies that have suspended their plans to go back to the office in early 2022. One of them is Manzana, which has also confirmed that it will give each of its employees, even those who work in retail, a bonus of $ 1,000 to buy the equipment they need to work from home. According to The Verge, the CEO of the company, Tim Cook, has confirmed the news to his staff through an email, in which he also confirms that there is still no specific date to return to the office.
Goal, the parent company of Facebook, has also confirmed that it will allow part of its employees to return to their offices later than planned when it reopens its offices in January. Therefore, it will open them as planned on January 31, but it will give its staff three options, according to Forbes: work in person, do it remotely for another three to five months. In this case, the plan applies to Meta workers who are in both the United States and Canada. Currently, Meta already has several offices open in the United States. Among them those of its headquarters, although only at 50% of its capacity.
These companies, along with Uber or Ford, They are the first to cancel the return to presence, although everything indicates that they will not be the last and that in the coming days we will witness a trickle of news from companies that change, for the umpteenth time, their reopening plans.
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