While I respect the court and accept its decision – it’s a disappointing one. The virus does not care about what the court thinks is right. While the decision allows businesses to keep operating (which is good), it also puts pressure on each business to create and enforce its own vaccination policy. Ultimately the smartest companies, like Delta, are doing it anyway and many others are and will too. The science is clear: the unvaccinated are creating the stress on the medical system. If this were leprosy, there would be no arguments. At the very end of it all, Darwin will sort out who’s who.

Strictly speaking it does make it easier for retailers to make decisions about mandates and testing, only because they can now choose not to do so. I suspect this will open the door legal action by individual employees against employers who decide to continue to mandate. We shall see.

I am not anti-vaccination – indeed, I have had two shots of Pfizer injected into my arm! However I completely agree with the Supreme Court’s decision. Regardless of the merits of vaccination or the intention of the mandate, this was government overreach on a grand scale that represented egregious interference in the personal decisions of individuals and in the policies of companies. That said, each company is entitled to set its own policies and standards. Some may choose to increase insurance for the unvaccinated and/or reduce benefits like sick time – which, for example, IKEA has done. Much, of course, depends on the progression of the latest variant. If, as seems to be happening in the UK, it represents a move from pandemic to endemic we can hopefully start to put all of this contentious debate behind us.

Retailers will continue to own this decision and smarter ones will mandate vaccination. Frankly, businesses where the mandate is not enforced will have greater exposure to the virus, an increase in the number of employees taking sick days, increase in concerns for unvaccinated colleagues, and decrease in morale that their business is protected from this awful disease. This is even more pronounced for front line retail workers. From a strictly business sense, this impacts productivity. However this decision should be in the hands of business leaders, not necessarily OSHA. If future variants have increased morbidity, this can become a much more real problem and maybe the federal government should intervene.

Companies should still make sure their workplaces are safe and unvaccinated employees make that a harder and costlier concern. These companies have every right to reduce their costs and push this cost to employees who don’t vaccinate. But companies subsidizing this cost will attract employees and generally have more employee support.

Had the court ruled the opposite way it would have made it easier for retailers to require that all employees get vaccinated. They could have simply stated, the government is making us do this. The court’s ruling forces each company to make a decision for its employees and to live with the consequences of its decision.

In this case, it makes the retailer’s job harder. An important role in government regulation is establishing the things we need as a society as our way forward – stepping in when purist free market ideals will fail. This was such a time and Biden’s administration was on the right track. Sadly the court is not.

At the end of the day, the companies cheering for this SCOTUS ruling are cheering for their businesses, at the expense of their employees and their customers.

I think the Supreme Court’s decision is right. COVID is unquestionably lethal, but it doesn’t precisely meet the ‘occasional hazard’ criterion, because there are a million other causes for people dying. However, in terms of complying with COVID standards and conducting regular testing, it is up to the retailers to determine how they are making their environment safer. It might include orders for double vaccinations, the use of masks, sanitization, or regular testing.

About the second question, workers should not be required to pay for mandatory tests. Since it’s about the safety of groups and communities, retailers should ensure collective efforts and contribute in regular tests instead of overburdening individual workers.