In a landmark ruling, a judge ruled in favor of the unvaccinated employees and ordered the Democratic New York City Council to reinstate them and pay them eight months of back pay.
Sixteen New York City Department of Disinfection employees have been reinstated and will receive more than eight months of back pay after the New York Supreme Court ruled that they were wrongfully fired and their rights violated because of the “arbitrary” vaccination mandate imposed on the city by Democrats.
“The vaccination requirement for city employees was not only about public health and safety but also compliance,” the court said in a decision released Tuesday.
“If it were about public health and safety, the unvaccinated employees would have been fired at the time of the order. No one would be exempt if it were a matter of public health and safety.”
“It is time for New York City to do what is right and what is just.”
In October 2021, under the administration of Bill De Blasio, New York City enacted a vaccination requirement that required all city employees to prove they had been vaccinated at least once against COVID-19.
At the time, de Blasio had announced that employees would be laid off without severance pay.
While they were still working full-time nearly four months after the mandate began, 1,500 city employees, including police officers, were laid off in February 2022 after being denied a religious or medical exemption for the vaccine.
Hundreds of others resigned after choosing between their bodily autonomy and their jobs.
The court also recognized that the city’s health department does not have the authority to unilaterally and indefinitely change an agency’s terms of employment because the plaintiffs had a natural immunity to Covid due to a previous infection with the coronavirus.
“Although vaccination should be encouraged, the public employees should not have been fired for their noncompliance,” the judges wrote.
“There is no evidence that it would be reasonable to maintain a vaccination requirement for public sector employees while removing the requirement for private sector employees or creating an exemption for certain professions such as athletes, entertainers, and artists.”
De Blasio left office last December and was replaced by fellow Democrat Eric Adams, who laid off workers and extended the mandate to private sector employees, then reversed himself a few months later under social pressure to exempt athletes and entertainers.
#BREAKING Judge Strikes Down NYC Vaccine Mandate for City Workers. “It’s null and void,” says attorney @ChadLaveglia. “We just defeated the vaccine mandate for every single city employee.” pic.twitter.com/PqqjhfNNCq
— NYCforYourself (@nycforyourself) October 24, 2022
In recent months, thousands of New Yorkers have protested this mandate and the draconian measures taken by the ruling Democrats.
Thanks to these protests, Adams exempted several groups from the mandate.
They stopped the rollout of so-called “vaccination cards” that forced private businesses to refuse goods and services to unvaccinated individuals.
In a state politically and legally dominated and controlled by Democrats, where judges have banned parents from seeing their children unless vaccinated, this ruling represents one of the most important legal victories against democratic authoritarianism in the name of COVID-19.