Eight Los Alamos employees who refused to get a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination have sued the lab’s operations contractor in federal court asked a judge Friday to put the mandate on hold, court papers filed this week show.
All eight of the plaintiffs received a religious exemption to Los Alamos’s vaccine mandate, which called for anyone not vaccinated or exempted to be fired by Oct. 15. The plaintiffs still stand to lose their jobs, however, because the only religious accommodation offered by Triad National Security, the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) Battelle-led contractor, is leave without pay.
The hearing was scheduled to wrap up after deadline Friday for Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor.
Triad’s blanket accommodation of leave without pay for religious refusers violates the plaintiffs constitutional rights and their rights under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to an individual, interactive process with Triad over their religious objections, the plaintiffs said in a complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for New Mexico.
Triad required employees who desired a religious accommodation to the vaccine mandate, announced Aug. 23, to seek the exemption from their supervisors. The mandate applied to lab employees, contractors and subcontractors, including those who exclusively telework. Anyone who takes leave without pay has only 30 days to return to the lab before Los Alamos can hire a replacement, according to the complaint.
Echoing plaintiffs in a lawsuit across the country, where vaccine refusers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have sued another Battelle-led DOE contractor, the eight Triad employees argued that precautions used to prevent COVID-19 transmission since the onset of the pandemic in early 2020 should be enough to stop the spread of the disease among both the unvaccinated and the vaccinated — the latter of whom, according to vaccine manufacturers and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, remain at some risk of contracting the illness, albeit in a less deadly form than unvaccinated people.
“Accommodating these employees working from home would impose no hardship on Triad at all, let alone an undue hardship,” the plaintiffs wrote. “Furthermore, accommodating employees working on site would not entail any undue hardship, because their having performed so well throughout the pandemic for the last eight (1) months shows that current precautions work.”
The federal suit filed last week followed a suit in state court on Sept. 27, in which many more Triad employees, more than 100 altogether, unsuccessfully attempted to get a judge in the state’s First Judicial District to block Triad’s mandate.
As of last week, Triad had fired about 30 people for refusing to take the vaccine while allowing around 130 to take leave without pay, according to someone familiar with management’s actions. That’s a tiny fraction of Triad’s workforce of around 10,000 employees and subcontractors.
“The health and safety of our workforce remains our priority and is also vital to ensure our national security mission,” a spokesperson for the lab operations and management contractor wrote in a Friday email to Nuclear Security & Deterrence Monitor. “Triad is grateful that nearly all employees — about 99% — have now taken the most important step to prevent the spread of COVID-19: getting vaccinated. The Laboratory is well positioned to meet our mission objectives now, and in the future, and we welcome the day when the COVID-19 pandemic ends.”
