The cleanup prime at the Oak Ridge Site in Tennessee should not be forced to hand over COVID-19 vaccination data for 100 people uninvolved with litigation filed by three fired employees, the company said this week in legal papers.
Plaintiffs Carlton Speer, Melana Dennis and Zachariah Duncan, terminated by Amentum-led United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR) after refusing vaccination for COVID-19 and seeking exemptions on religious grounds, asked the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Tennessee to order the contractor to produce records for workers who received vaccination policy exemptions on medical grounds.
UCOR has said the complaint by the three plaintiffs should be tossed partly for their failure to state a claim for relief. The case is one of a trio of ongoing UCOR vaccination-firing-related lawsuits being pursued through federal courts.
In a different COVID-19 termination lawsuit by a radiation technician, UCOR is arguing before the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals it is entitled to sovereign immunity as a government contractor. The company has said it was carrying out government policy on contractor employee vaccination brought about by an executive order from President Joe Biden.
A third vaccination-related lawsuit was filed against UCOR in February by 21 plaintiffs who previously tried unsuccessfully to become part of a class action complaint against UCOR. The lawsuit said the workers were also subject to UCOR’s COVID-19 inoculation mandate and fired around Nov. 1, 2021 despite “sincerely-held” religious beliefs. According to a status report filed online Tuesday, UCOR plans to argue the plaintiffs failed to exhaust administrative appeals and that their claims are time-barred.
Another COVID-vaccination lawsuit, against a different DOE contractor at the site, Oak Ridge National Laboratory manager UT-Battelle, is scheduled for trial later this month.
As for the Speer case, the three plaintiffs have not filed any American Disabilities Act failure-to-accommodate claims but they seek access to “documentation about every worker who was granted a medical exemption from the UCOR’s vaccine mandate,” according to a Tuesday filing. This includes information on “the costs and burdens UCOR suffered” in issuing the exemptions.
“To say that because UCOR granted an accommodation to one employee, with differing circumstances in their individual case, it does not automatically follow (as Plaintiffs are arguing) that a request for a similar accommodation from a different employee with different job duties and other material differences, and made under a different legal standard would be reasonable,” UCOR said in the filing.
UCOR also said it was obligated to control the risk of the spread of COVID-19 to other employees or the public.
The three fired employees first filed suit in October 2021 alleging religious discrimination against UCOR but it was dismissed given the plaintiffs skipped the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission stage. The plaintiffs subsequently filed the current action in November 2022 after getting the right-to-sue notice from the employment commission.
U.S. District Judge Travis McDonough rejected the plaintiffs’ motion to certify a class action lawsuit against UCOR in November 2023. In February, the judge rejected a motion from 23 potential new plaintiffs to intervene in the suit, and rejected a motion to reconsider.
