Unemployment for the unvaccinated?

When the 2022 session of the Minnesota Legislature begins at the end of this month, a measure is likely to be on the agenda bestowing unemployment compensation benefits on workers who have lost jobs because they're not vaccinated.

The proposition is riding a small wave, having been enacted in five states: Arkansas, Florida and Tennessee in the South, and Kansas and Iowa in the Midwest. The laws have a distinct but not uniform political hue. While all these states have Republican-controlled legislatures, the Kansas measure was signed into law by a Democratic governor.

Similar measures are being contemplated in a variety of states, including Wyoming and Wisconsin.

One impetus is the desire to avoid penalizing those who refuse vaccination on religious grounds, primarily pro-lifers who recoil from the vaccines because some are purportedly tested on fetal cell lines.

But an unmistakable consequence of such policies, perhaps desired by supporters, is to encourage vaccine resisters to continue resisting.

The situation sports many incongruities. Four of the states that have enacted these measures, and others contemplating them, have cut off the federal boost to unemployment benefits due to expressed concern that enhanced jobless benefits would discourage people from working. Yet, the same policymakers now promote adding to the unemployment rolls to reward workers "standing up for their beliefs," in the words of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.

The proposed largesse for unemployed anti-vaxxers could create unusual alignments of political forces at the two chambers in St. Paul.

For their part, DFLers, who control the House, have rarely met an unemployment compensation expansion they did not like, given the cash it bestows on working men and women. But extending benefits to the unvaccinated would cut against progressives' endorsement of vaccine mandates.

These contradictions and conundrums may provide grist for the fall election campaigns in some legislative races, and even the gubernatorial contest.

The clashes also may play out in the shadow of a pending case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hold a special session Jan. 7 to hear a challenge to the validity of the workplace vaccine mandates rolled out by the Biden administration last fall.

But the outcome in this consolidation of cases brought by some 27 Republican-controlled "red" states may not affect the unemployment-for-the-unvaccinated movement.

The Biden measure applies principally to large employers with 100 or more employees, to independent contractors with the federal government and to most health care workers, about 84 million in all, some 25% who are not vaccinated now. But it does not cover the rest of the workforce.

Additionally, there are other lawsuits in Minnesota challenging employer mandates that may survive or perish in separate court rulings here.

So the dispute over unemployment for the unvaccinated seems likely to remain unresolved and a source of potential legislative strife.

And all this will extend the crazy quilt pattern of policies. In the early days of the pandemic, unemployment administrators, backed by the courts, generally disallowed benefits for employees who refused to work due to perceived health and safety laxities by management. But, as the pandemic intensified, the decisions shifted, tending in favor of employees who refused to come to work or who were refused accommodations like remote working.

That transition was consistent with pre-COVID law in Minnesota and elsewhere that permitted displaced employees, generally those who have resigned, to collect benefits if they quit due to serious workplace improprieties or their own health-related reasons.

But under another legal tenet, employees who refuse to abide by their employers' legitimate policies are generally restricted from receiving compensation benefits. That principle could undermine the unemployment rights of vaccination refusers if their employers have voluntarily adopted vaccine policies, regardless of how the Biden mandate is resolved.

Gov. Tim Walz and his counterparts in some states have unilaterally promulgated executive orders lifting some restrictions on unemployment benefits during the pandemic. But because the emergency powers under which they acted generally have expired, any extension of benefits to the unvaccinated would probably require legislation passed by both chambers and approved by the governor.

That's why politics and ideology may make for strange bedfellows among the solons in St. Paul.