Six employees at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory who refused COVID-19 vaccine are assured of their day in court after obtaining a right to sue from a federal agency, the judge in the case confirmed this week.
The six plaintiffs filed an amended complaint Jan. 4 against the University of Tennessee- Battelle partnership (UT-Battelle) operating the lab and told the court they received right-to-sue letters from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), U.S. District Court Judge Charles Atchley Jr. said in a two-page order on Monday, ending the contractor’s attempt to get the case thrown out of court quickly.
UT-Battelle’s dismissal motion from November relied heavily on the plaintiff employees’ failure to exhaust their administrative remedies before heading to court. Now that the employees completed some of the skipped steps in their grievance process, the contractor’s motion is “denied as moot,” the judge held.
The plaintiffs initially challenged the vaccination mandate in October, saying placement on unpaid leave was not an appropriate way to address workers receiving medical or religious exemptions from the vaccine order.. But the affected employees returned to work in mid-December after a federal district judge in Georgia blocked enjoined the DOE from enforcing its contractor vaccine mandate nationally.
All six of the anti-vaccine employees cited religious objections to receiving the vaccine.
