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NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

iapps.courts.state.ny.us

241–250 of 443 posts

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice rant, but as per the ruling [1], I believe it is now scientific and popular concensus that the vaccine barely moves the needle on transmission if at all. At that point, any logic behind mandates vaccinations collapses. [1] “ Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19”

[citation needed] According to the CDC, HHS, Johns-Hopkins and every single medical school, hospital and scientific organization in the US, as well as 224M vaccinated US citizens, the COVID vaccines are effective at preventing severe disease, hospitalization, and death.

I didn’t claim it wasn’t effective at those things as I’m sure you know. My comment was about effectiveness in reducing infection and transmission.

This is the only logical and “potentially” ethical (in some twisted peoples heads) basis for a vaccine mandate. It has now been totally debunked.

I literally quoted a linked article issued by the NY Supreme Court for your citation.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#242
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post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's within the best interests of the city that… Yes, but that’s not the sole requirement. In addition to serving a legitimate government purpose, a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious. Every order has to meet both requirements, and this one only meets one of them. From the ruling: “This Court finds that based on the analysis above, the Commissioner’s Order of October 20, 2021, violated t…

>a government order must also avoid being arbitrary or capricious There were two separate orders. The first was for public employees, and the second was for private employees. I agree that the second was capricious, but the first was consistent. The city is allowed to fire city employees. Maybe something about it is unconstitutional, but the ruling completely handwaves this, as well as the justification for backpay.

> The city is allowed to fire city employees.

The city union disagrees rather strongly with that :) In particular, the city’s contract with these workers does not require them to be vaccinated. If your boss sprung a new rule on you and then fired you for not following it, you would be pretty upset too. Especially if it required you to take actions that you thought were potentially risky to your own personal health and safety. I’ll let you read the ruling yourself though, since it was more nuanced than that and I am tired of transcribing from a scan of a printout of a digital document.

Having multiple separate orders that result in an unconstitutional outcome is not really different from having a single unconstitutional order. I don’t know why you keep bringing that up; it’s not very interesting.

Also, awarding back pay is super common in wrongful–termination suits. Any time the harm resulting from a tort is monetary, it is quite ordinary to redress that harm through monetary means. In fact, in most cases it’s one of the easiest forms of harm to redress. The court cannot undo the harm to someone’s reputation nearly as easily, for example.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They were fired for cause, namely, insubordination The idea that you can order someone to perform a medical procedure because they work for you is disguisting. Where does this end?

> Where does it end? It ends with your survival. Vaccination isn't surgery, it's an extremely minor medical procedure that reduces or eliminates the risk of contracting a disease. During a deadly global pandemic, refusing vaccination is nothing short of suicidal . 97M Americans were infected and more than a million died. There were over 630M cases globally, and over 6.5M died due to COVID. The People have the stronge…

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Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#244
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Something I've been wondering in recent cases where courts are overturning recent government action, whether unconstitutional bills passed into law, or unconstitutional executive actions that overstep authority, is where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place? The state of New York famously responded to the outcome of NYSRPA v. Bruen, which overturned the defacto ban on concealed carry, by decl…

>where's the penalty for committing those actions in the first place You've hit the core problem of society/government that countless generations have tried to obfuscate via an academic body that implies that social interactions can be studied/understood like natural sciences. At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence - Commit non-violent white collar crime? Show up to court, because if you…

>At the core, all social structure is built on the threat of violence

This is completely wrong. Our current social structure in the United States is build on the threat of violence. Sense of duty, sense of shame, fear of ostracism, respect for tradition and family are all forms of social structure that have existed since we were crafting tools from stone. Of course all of these non-violent forms of social structure require a somewhat homogeneous population that shares the same values and culture. Many native American tribes had social structures like this where there was no police force, no threat of violence to enforce social norms. However, when a hodgepodge of people with different beliefs, different cultures, different educational levels, different educational values, different religions and different histories are jammed together in overcrowded cities the result is always going to be the same. Perhaps we should write "Our diversity is our strength!" On the side of all the prisons and police cars to make people feel better.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#245
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Confusing: you haven't written a sibling comment? What are you talking about? Did you use a second account?

Did I use the term incorrectly? A sibling comment is someone else’s comment that shares a parent comment, is it not? I’ve seen others use this term

I think that the confusion is with the word my. If you had said a sibling comment, it would likely have been immediately clear. Linking or quoting the sibling comment would avoid linguistic ambiguity altogether.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS. Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

Home Depot was open because people need to fix shit around their house if you want them to stay home. What's arbitrary about that? I agree with you about the beaches. But in the early days, we didn't really know what worked and what didn't. People said 6 feet apart was safe enough indoors because "droplets containing the virus fall to the ground".

It was arbitrary because small hardware stores had to close, while big ones could stay open. Also, because in most states someone in the governor’s office just went down a random list of professions or business types and decided on the spot whether to shut them down or not. That’s the very definition of arbitrary and capricious. It also fails the rational basis test, since the government hadn’t even come up with a rationale for why certain businesses have to close while others can stay open. Or why a Walmart could have a 500 people in it, while churches were limited to 10 people at a time (regardless of the size of the church’s building, even), etc.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism. Having competing priorities is common enough, I don't see what doesn't make sense here. The city wants everyone to be vaccinated but it also wants broadway and basketball to be happening more, so they came up with this policy.

Why do firefighters have no effect on tourism? Without them you can not run a city. Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

> Same for many other jobs like garbage collection.

Spoken like someone who hasn't been to New York. I love the city, its a fun and vibrant place. But they have some unusual trash policies (primarily they don't have alleys so trash has to be dumped on the main sidewalk) and wherever you go its not uncommon for the sidewalks to be lined with trash waiting for pickup.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it make sense to exempt those people but not, say, firefighters?

Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism. Having competing priorities is common enough, I don't see what doesn't make sense here. The city wants everyone to be vaccinated but it also wants broadway and basketball to be happening more, so they came up with this policy.

> Because athletes and performers are irreplaceable and bring in tourist revenue which the city wants. Firefighters are more easily replaceable and have no effect on tourism.

I believe this is the most cynical thing I've read yet today.

> I don't see what doesn't make sense here

If the Athletes and Performers are so irreplaceable, then wouldn't you demand they be the most protected by the vaccine, and thus require them to have it before you would require the firefighters? They are so replaceable, afterall...

> so they came up with this policy.

They wanted to force compliance, but then realized there are some people who see themselves as above compliance, so they carved out their own policy in a telling way to kowtow to them.

Dollars are replaceable. People aren't. You can't actually be happy to wrap this cynicism around this, can you?

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That definitely plays into the sabotage thread. Any competent corp counsel would have been able to navigate around this issue.

Regardless of if they were the right thing to do, many of the various covid mandates being enacted through whatever form of decree really didn’t seem like they fit inside the authority of the government executives trying to enact them. Many were also made to be unenforceable so they’d never be tested in court while still influencing people. The rule of law is important and limiting the power of “rulers” to make large…

Us Americans are so obsessed with government overreach that you'd think our corporate overloads are actually treating us well and that the government is the bad guy.

When the government wants to fuck us over, think what the NSA has been doing, they won't look for precedents so there's no point in treating every decision they make as a potential sliperry slope.

Covid was/is killing people, vaccines prevent that, so vaccines must be required. Very simple.

Re: NY Supreme Court reinstates NYC's fired unvaccinated employees, orders backpay

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same happened in CA with some stores being open and others closed. Why was Home Depot open? It made no sense in terms of spreading the disease . It was just arbitrary BS. Closing the beaches was stupid too. If there ever was a safe place then it was the beach or state park wheee uou are in the open and the window blows.

People were rabidly cheering it on too. Police going around shutting playgrounds and arresting parents for playing outdoors with their children, while at the same time the politicians they voted for were constantly and egregiously shown to be flouting the rules on frivolities, parties, travel, fun. And there were excuses for the politicians and bloodlust for the commoner trying to exercise or raise their child. Absol…

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