A handful of employees at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee have until Tuesday to respond to their employer’s motion to dismiss a federal lawsuit about the lab’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
Just after Christmas, on Dec. 27, U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley allowed the six employees of UT-Battelle, the University of Tennessee and Battelle joint venture that runs the lab, another two weeks to respond to the contractor’s motion to toss the suit from the U.S. District Court for East Tennessee.
The plaintiffs asked for extra time because, they said, they only received notification on Dec. 17 from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) that they could escalate the dispute against the contractor to the courts.
Their lawsuit actually dates to October, but UT-Battelle had said the vaccine refusers did not exhaust their administration remedies at EEOC before they headed to court — an argument the plaintiffs now hope they have rendered moot.
Early in the case, in November, the court rejected the plaintiffs’ first request for an injunction against the vaccine mandate, ruling that employees who refused a shot would not suffer irreparable harm by being placed on unpaid leave. Across the DOE complex, unpaid leave was the typical consequence for those who secured a religious exemption to the mandate.
But the Oak Ridge lab staffers were called back to work, at least for the time being, when a federal district judge in Georgia issued a nationwide injunction against the federal contractor vaccine mandate set in motion by the Joe Biden administration.
