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Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. You're listening to The Takeaway. On Aug 1, there were at least 79,000 reported cases of COVID-19 in the US. The number is well below the more than a quarter-million cases reported at the pandemic's height back in January, but it's a significant and troubling increase. These are the kinds of case numbers we hoped were behind us forever after vaccines became widely available.

In many ways, the most distressing days are a thing of the past for the fully vaccinated. The overwhelming majority of serious cases are occurring among unvaccinated people. Major private-sector employers are therefore taking a step many had long resisted, requiring the COVID-19 vaccine for certain groups of employees. Facebook, Google, Walmart, Disney all announced last week that at least some of their employees will need to get vaccinated.

Disney is still in the process of negotiating a vaccination requirement for its union employees, but Walmart has held off on requiring its store and warehouse workers to get vaccinated. That's despite the fact that lower-wage workers are less likely to have received the vaccine. As workers navigate this patchwork of requirements, we want to hear from you on this. Is your employer currently implementing a vaccine requirement or mask mandate? How do you feel about it?

Judy: Hi. This is Judy in Walnut Creek, California. My company does not require vaccination, but we must report to HR our vaccination status or we can decline to state. If one declines to state, one has to follow protocols for unvaccinated staff which includes masking while indoors, unless you can be in a room by yourself with the door closed. Everyone working in the office is now required to wear a mask while working indoors.

Alejandro: Hey, it's Alejandro from Denton. My workplace recently instituted a mask mandate again, but it does not have a vaccine requirement. However, the mask mandate makes me feel a lot more secure and it also gives me the freedom to call people out for not wearing a mask because the policy backs me up.

Dan: Hi, I'm Dan from Southwest Arkansas. I am a school administrator. Now we cannot have a mask mandate because our legislators have passed a law that prohibits us from making the local decisions for our schools in terms of mask mandates for teachers or students.

Bonnie: Hi. My name is Bonnie. I'm calling from Parker, Colorado. As a teacher going back to work this week and students returning next week, I'm very concerned that there's no vaccine or mask mandate. With the CDC recommending masking with the Delta variant, I will be masking and wish that everybody was required to do so.

Charlie: This is Charlie calling from Edmonds, Washington. I am the owner-operator of a small remodeling firm. Vaccination is required for anybody on our job site. That's our choice. With the Delta variant making its astounding appearance, we insist on masks everywhere inside. If the home is occupied during the work, most of my customers would insist on masks anyway and have for the last year and a half.

Anna: This is Anna calling from Staten Island. I worked for a small business that had a mask mandate in place since we reopened in June of 2020. We never looked at it when the CDC relaxed their guidelines because it was never clear who was going to be responsible if somebody unvaccinated came to work and got seriously ill. Is it the company's responsibility or would it be the unvaccinated individuals? I'm just dumbfounded actually that almost half of the workforce in my company is still unvaccinated and we're still accommodating them just the way we did before the vaccines were even available.

Nicole: Hi. My name is Nicole. I'm calling from Texas. My employer was threatening to fire people if they let others know about their exposure to COVID after a positive test. They don't even allow us to say anything to customers that come in the door if they're not wearing a mask. If customers want to chastise us for wearing a mask, that's perfectly acceptable too. This is a very well-known large company and I fear for my safety due to their lack of caution.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: A growing number of major businesses are in the process of rolling out vaccine requirements, but some of these requirements only apply to groups of employees that are already much more likely to be vaccinated. For more on these policies, I'm joined by Lauren Hirsch, reporter for The New York Times who focuses on business and policy. Lauren, thank you for being here.

Lauren Hirsch: Thanks for having me.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You mentioned in your recent reporting that the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission has said twice since last December that employers can require their employees to get vaccinated. Why are we only seeing these requirements emerging now?

Lauren Hirsch: It's a great question. Employers, many have wanted to vaccinate their workforce for over a year now but they've really been worried about litigation. There's some precedent but not a lot and the vaccine still get half-full FDA approval. There's also been a lot of concern around the political aspects of it. Will employees revolt? Will they push back? Will they quit en masse? Companies don't really like to be the first mover on a whole lot of things. What has happened over the past several months is the Delta variant, so employers realize this.

Unfortunately, does not seem to be going away anytime soon. In fact, there are new questions that they'll have to answer. There have been some legal rulings around the issue, including a hospital that had mandated vaccines for its employees. They sued and the court overthrew that suit, and three, we've seen a number of governments institute their own mandates. That really provides cover for the companies. Employers reached the point where they decided there were enough forces and it was time and they felt a little bit more comfortable instituting a mandate now, whereas they were afraid to even a month or so ago.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It feels very topsy-turvy to me because I genuinely remember as recently as a year ago that the question was when are we going to have access? That the policies initially were to keep a run on vaccines from happening by rolling them out slowly. What has happened over the course of that year to shift this so dramatically?

Lauren Hirsch: What has happened is there's really been this divide in the country over who has been vaccinated and who is not. It's fallen along economic lines, it's fallen along racial lines. Companies need to deal with that issue. There are some who would never go back to the office if they were not fully vaccinated and would never go back if their co-workers were fully vaccinated. There are others who don't want to get vaccinated. Many companies employed both sets, which is a little bit why we're beginning to see another issue that has emerged really even over the past couple of weeks, which is different mandates for different kinds of workforces because they have to manage that a bit.

It is very complicated issue. Then you get to the point of, what does the CEO want? The CEO, by and large, wants his or her workforce to be safe and healthy and not worry about an outbreak. For them, they would vastly prefer having the entire workforce vaccinated, but the rollout just didn't reach as broad of a breadth as people had hoped, or certainly as quickly as I'd hoped. Therefore, employers need to now deal with the irregularities under which it essentially rolled out.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It feels like those that are not requiring vaccines are also not requiring masks, which seems like it should be the inverse?

Lauren Hirsch: I would say it's not quite that clear. There's a number of retailers that when the new CDC guidelines came out, they said you'd have to wear masks regardless of whether or not you're vaccinated. Publix, Kroger, Target, and those companies are not yet mandating vaccines. It just raises a whole other issue because if you're requiring masks, and you're depending on whether or not they're vaccinated, then how are you deciding or confirming whether or not they're vaccinated?

How do you bring people back into the office and make them wear masks when you're telling them it's safe but the idea of wearing masks gives you the feeling that it's not safe? In some ways, requiring a mask is easier than requiring a vaccine because there's less fear around litigation. In other ways, it's harder because it really makes the hours in which you're working less enjoyable. It doesn't really get you to the place of norm that so many employers want to get to.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What are some of the patterns that we're seeing, particularly across these large businesses, the Walmarts, the Disneys, between maybe what we might call the professional salary class, and then those who are maybe working hourly wages and maybe don't have white-collar workers versus the more blue and pink collar workers within a single large company?

Lauren Hirsch: It's a great question. Walmart is a great example of it. They are mandating vaccines for its corporate workforce, those in its headquarters. It is not mandating it for those in its stores. Walmart won't say why the difference. A pretty safe bet is the fact that there's a labor shortage right now. A lot of retailers are just having a hard time hiring. They're having a hard time keeping workers. Once you get into this vaccine mandate situation, one does need to worry about whether or not you're going to lose workers. A lot of Walmart stores are in areas where the population is less vaccinated than in other parts of the country.

Morgan Stanley the investment bank is mandating vaccines in its New York offices for employees and those who are visiting. That's only for New York offices and it only did it when it was 90% vaccinated. A really big question is whether or not companies will be comfortable or willing to extend these mandates when their workforce is significantly less vaccinated. You mentioned Disney. Right now, they have mandated vaccines, but they are negotiating the issue with the team. Right now, its union workers are excluded from that mandate, and unions as a whole are not really all falling along the same lines as to how they view the issue.

Some are supportive of mandate; some are less supportive and that's in part a reflection of the people that make up their groups. It's something that I and many others are really watching over the next couple of months because the industries with unions and the industries with labor shortages tend to be the industries that are most exposed to the virus. What is the political appetite for imposing it and how far ultimately will these mandates go if we're limited by those factors?

Melissa Harris-Perry: Help me understand maybe the legal framework or basis here? Again, working on college campuses, we have required vaccines of all kinds for as long as I've been a professor and a student, so 35 years or something. There were all kinds of different vaccines that you had to have in order to work and live and learn on campus. I'm thinking about circumstances for many folks in the workforce where they're subjected to random drug testing, for example. Why is this somehow so different?

Lauren Hirsch: A couple of reasons. One is schools are great and education is a great reference point and many people have pointed to it. There's Supreme Court rulings saying that educational institutions can require vaccines, but it's not a one-to-one when you think about a private employer so it's not a perfect comparison. Another issue is the fact that while the vaccines have emergency authorization, they don't have full FDA approval. That has made a number of employers, at least until the past couple of weeks, nervous about the mandates.

You even have states trying to pass laws that say you can't mandate vaccines for anyone that aren't fully FDA approved and so simply targeting the COVID vaccine itself. Of course, backdrop against all of this is how politically charged the entire debate and issue has been. All of a sudden, something that's a health issue has also taken on political overtones and that's an area that employers hate being in but have dropped fast in.

To your earlier point, yes, the EEOC said twice, first in December then followed up to say employers may require this, but it is untested in terms of an employer requiring a vaccine. There's always the threat of lawsuits and it's been described to me. Of course, they'll be just sued. Whether or not those lawsuits will be victorious is a different question. So far, we've already seen one lawsuit over the issue being thrown out. No employer likes to deal with litigation, likes to deal with those headlines and so that has been top of the list of their concerns.

Melissa Harris-Perry: It certainly feels like being sued is just true big capital T, whether you require vaccines or not. It just depends on whether you're sued for requiring them or sued for not requiring them.

Lauren Hirsch: Exactly. Absolutely. Yes.

Melissa Harris-Perry: When you talk about the current retail labor shortage, have you talked with workers? Have they described reluctance to return to work because of vaccines or a reluctance to return to work because vaccines are being required?

Lauren Hirsch: It's a great question. We're only beginning to see how workers will respond to these mandates. Retail, many of those workers have been in the frontlines since the beginning for most of the pandemic. In many ways, protecting a fully vaccinated workforce and customer base would protect them but not everyone is going to want to be vaccinated as we've seen. That is what makes it so complicated.

In terms of going back into the office, in one of our stories that we covered on this issue, we spoke about an Apple employee who basically said to us, "Why would I want to go back to the office if you're not going to mandate vaccines? You're telling me it's not safe, and I have to do it and I've been productive in my home for a year and a half?" There's just so many layers and so many different views on this. Of course, the main concern should probably be the health and safety of everyone, but there's also management issues and HR issues that employers are thinking through.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Lauren Hirsch is a reporter for The New York Times who focuses on business and policy. Lauren, thank you so much.

Lauren Hirsch: Thanks for having me.

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