On September 9th, Joe Biden issued a sweeping federal vaccine requirement to combat the Delta variant and get the US economy back on track after riding on the whims of coronavirus surges. From the moment he issued the requirement, Republican governors have voiced their opposition to the mandate.
Twelve states, including Texas, have banned vaccine mandates, but few of those bans address the private sector. What makes Texas’s ban unusual is that it prevents private employers from requiring their employees to be vaccinated. However, Texas’s ban on vaccine mandates is not being embraced by many of the large corporations that call Texas home.
Companies such as American Airlines, Southwest Airlines and Dell Technologies all have their headquarters in Texas. Dell has had a vaccine mandate since January, and both American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have said they will defy the governor’s mandate and follow the president’s lead. There are two simple reasons why companies are eager to flout Texas’s new mandate.
The first reason is legal. The federal government supersedes state governments. State mandates can only go so far in the face of federal mandates. Add in the fact that legal challenges to Biden’s mandate are unlikely to be successful and businesses simply want to hitch their wagon to the winning legal battle.
The second reason has to do with their bottom line. Large corporations view the vaccine as the best way to get their businesses and the overall economy back and humming.
Witold Henisz, the Deloitte & Touche Professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, believes “the large companies — the airlines, the big retailers — they want to get to the point where it’s safe for their employees to come in. So they’re overall happy with the mandate.”
Henisz would also say that large companies view the conflicting mandates as a “hassle.” Another reason why companies are less than enthused by the conflicting vaccine mandates is that it puts them in the political crosshairs.
If a company pushes a vaccine mandate on their employees that they believe will aid their business and safety, it makes them appear to be siding with the president. However, if they fail to require vaccines, they could be accused by others to be siding with the state government.