In the end, most if not all big Department of Energy contractors will fall in line behind a federal requirement for workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, although some workers will quit rather than taking the shot, based on conversations with five industry sources this week.
Most of these people, whom Weapons Complex Monitor granted anonymity to speak candidly about their employees and customers, are executive level managers at small to medium-size DOE contractors. These people spoke after many top-tier DOE contractors such as Amentum, BWX Technologies and Fluor have either explicitly said that they will follow the federal vaccine order or who have stakes in joint-venture companies that had already announced their own mandates at DOE nuclear sites.
“As a company, we are liable for their insurance,” and those costs surge when employees are hospitalized, one senior contractor executive said this week. At this person’s company, about 70% of the staff are already vaccinated.
This source expects that between a third and half of the holdouts will get their shots now that President Joe Biden issued a Sept. 9 executive order covering federal employees and contractors. Large companies doing business with the federal government will “see it as cover,” the manager said by phone Friday.
But there will be plenty of hassles and headaches ahead, said this source and four others who spoke with the Monitor this week.
One of these is litigation. Republican attorneys general in 24 states, including several with DOE nuclear facilities, are threatening to sue if the White House goes forward with a sweeping vaccine requirement, which is supposed to be detailed by a federal task force later this month.
Specific issues looming ahead will include the handling of teleworkers who rarely if ever have in-person contact with colleagues. Then there is the need to define any medical or religious exemptions, and stipulating who will make the final call — DOE or firms that directly employ the person seeking an exception.
Most management and employees believe a mandate is the right way to approach the spread of the virus, said an executive at a second company. “But there is a minority that consider this against their freedom and a few that may decide to leave or sue.”
A third contractor source said it is simple for DOE to require people to be vaccinated in order to show up on the sites. But “to force employees to be vaxed as a condition of employment even if they don’t go to DOE or other federal sites,” the source said. … “Let’s just say it’s murky.”
“You are down to your most reluctant ones,” perhaps 20% to 30% depending on the site, said a fourth source. Some companies might be leery of forcing holdouts to take the shots on the chance they get seriously sick later and attribute it to the vaccine forced upon them, the executive said.
“It’s a noble goal” to try and keep everybody safe, said a fifth source. But with much of the DOE weapons complex retirement-eligible, “this will accelerate the brain drain.”
No Solid EM-wide Data Provided Yet on Vaccination Rate
Although the deadline has passed for DOE Office of Environmental Management staff and most contractors to attest whether they have been inoculated, the office on Friday did not say if it had met the deadline, and if it had, what percentage of the workforce had attested to being fully vaccinated.
“That information is not available for release at this time,” a spokesperson said in a Friday email.
Preliminary figures show the DOE liquid waste cleanup contractor at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina has roughly two-thirds of its workforce vaccinated against COVID-19, a spokesman for Amentum-led Savannah River Remediation said Sep. 10.
The early figures show more than 65% of the SRR workforce has been vaccinated. “This compares to approximately 45% for the surrounding states,” the spokesman said, referring to South Carolina and Georgia. The federal complex bumps up against the Georgia state line.
The SRR spokesman was responding to a press inquiry from Weapons Complex Monitor, before President Biden announced plans for a federal worker mandate on Sept. 9.
SRR will be “implementing the vaccine requirements recently announced by President Biden,” and the plan will include clauses for medical and religious exemptions, the spokesman said.
Other members of the Savannah River cleanup team are Bechtel, Jacobs, and BWXT.
A trio of joint ventures at DOE nuclear sites previously announced vaccine mandates —Battelle-led Triad National Security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, UCOR, an Amentum-Jacobs team handling cleanup at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee and Savannah River Nuclear Solutions, the Fluor-led site-management contractor for the Savannah River Site.
As for the potential legal wrangling, the Republican attorneys general said the White House order will not persuade but instead harden vaccine opposition.
