COVID Vaccine OK If Not Mandatory, UAW President Says

With the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to claim lives and disrupt life in the U.S., the new president of the UAW, Ray Curry, continues to urge union members and their families to get the available vaccines. 

Curry, though, stops short of endorsing vaccine mandates by employers such as Detroit’s automakers or their suppliers where workers are unionized. 

“We are concerned, and what we are doing is strongly urging our members to get vaccinated,” Curry (pictured, below left) says during a roundtable discussion with reporters. 

Ever since vaccines against COVID-19 became available in late 2020, the UAW has said the vaccines should be voluntary.

Given the recent surge in the number of COVID-19 cases reported nationally and President Joe Biden’s recommendation employers impose vaccine mandates, the UAW would consider discussing mandatory vaccines, he says. “But I can’t tell you what the final product will look like,” he says, noting the UAW’s overall policy has been to respect members’ right to privacy and their concerns about individual medical conditions as well as religious beliefs. 

Curry says even contract changes such as increasing health insurance co-pays and deductibles for unvaccinated employees – a measure recently announced by Delta Airlines – would require changes to collective bargaining agreements.

None of the union’s existing contracts with 700 employers requires employees to be vaccinated against other diseases such as polio, Curry notes. 

In addition, collecting information about an employee’s vaccination status is problematic under federal medical privacy laws. 

UAW-Ray Curry

In response to increasing COVID-19 positive case rates across the U.S., and GM’s ongoing commitment to employees’ safety, the company earlier this month implemented an expanded vaccination status reporting process that was mandatory for all U.S. salaried workers.

“We gathered this information via a confidential online tool. The reporting of our employees’ vaccination status is helping GM Medical assess the overall immunity of our employee population and determine when GM should relax or strengthen certain COVID-19 safety protocols as recommended by the CDC and OSHA, such as mask wearing, physical distancing and facility occupancy rates,” GM says in an e-mailed statement. 

Curry says he will continue to use his position to advocate for vaccinations and for booster shots that will soon be available. The union also is dedicating a portion of its website to posting information about the need for vaccines and fighting vaccine disinformation, he says. 

COVID-19 has upended supply chains, creating shortages not only of semiconductors but also other components, leading to layoffs of autoworkers, says Curry.

The pandemic is a global problem that reaches beyond the auto industry or an individual plant, Curry notes. “It’s more than one particular source,” says Curry, noting there has not been a COVID-19 outbreak in any plant where workers are represented by the UAW. “Our members flow out into the community each and every day,” he says.

The new UAW president says he supports Biden’s push for electric vehicles. Prior to Biden’s announcement that battery-electric vehicles should account for up to 50% of the vehicles sold in the U.S. by 2030, the UAW had the chance to review future product plans of GM, Ford and Stellantis, and is satisfied it will have a major role reaching the president’s goal, Curry says. 

Curry says expanding the union’s membership rolls from the current 400,000 will be the key to his success as UAW president. The growth of electric vehicle sales and pressure for unionization in a variety of new sectors all open the door to growing the union’s membership rolls, he adds.

He emphasizes the union has new “layers” of auditing in place to prevent any recurrence of the scandals that hobbled the UAW in recent years and left two of Curry’s predecessors, Gary Jones and Dennis Williams, facing prison terms. 

The need to rebuild the U.S. economy, coupled with Biden’s pledge to create good union jobs, also are working in the UAW’s favor, Curry says, predicting plants building batteries for EVs will be unionized and even new semiconductor plants planned for the U.S. will be targeted by union organizers, Curry notes. 

Makers of heavy trucks and construction equipment such as Volvo Truck and Daimler Truck – where Curry once worked as an assembler, and now is employee representative on the Supervisory Board of Daimler AG – are filling orders in anticipation of increased spending on infrastructure. That trend plays to one of the union’s traditional strengths, he says.