Citigroup to fire US workers who refuse vaccine

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Citigroup will fire at the end of January its employees in the United States who have not been vaccinated or received an exemption, according to a person familiar with the matter, adopting one of the strictest policies among the big Wall Street banks.

The bank had said in October that it would require US employees to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 as a condition of keeping their jobs, and set a January 14 deadline for employees to report whether they have been vaccinated or received medical or religious exemptions. or other exceptions provided for by local law.

At Citi, employees who have not been vaccinated will be placed on unpaid leave for the remainder of the month and terminated on January 31, according to the source. News of the bank’s term was first reported by Bloomberg News.

The move comes as a federal order to vaccinate or test for major employers comes under legal scrutiny, with the US Supreme Court hearing arguments over Biden administration policy on Friday.

More than 90% of employees at Citi, which has about 65,000 employees in the US, are vaccinated, and bank management expects the number to rise as the deadline approaches.

Citi’s vaccination policy is strict compared to those of other banks, such as JPMorgan Chase, which have left the door open to make vaccination mandatory but have yet to do so. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs require employees to be vaccinated before entering offices.

President Joe Biden announced last year that companies with 100 employees or more would have to ensure that all personnel were vaccinated or tested negative on a weekly basis. The order is being challenged in court by a group of Republican governors and business groups, and met with skepticism from members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Friday.

The high court hearing primarily discussed whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (Osha), the federal agency in charge of workplace safety, has the legal power to enforce such a sweeping order. She’s trying to do it as an immediate emergency rule, rather than going through a formal regulatory process that could take months.

The order is expected to take effect on Monday, though Osha said it would give companies another month to set up a testing scheme for unvaccinated employees.

Judges will be able to decide later this weekend whether to put the order on hold while legal challenges continue in lower courts.

While the three members of the liberal wing of the Supreme Court on Friday expressed varying degrees of support for the order, in the face of rising Covid-19 cases, the six-member conservative majority seemed less convinced, questioning whether the order was too far-reaching and whether the Osha was the proper authority to issue comprehensive rules for employers.

Wall Street banks, which have been one of the biggest advocates of the return to the office, are among several companies that have had their efforts to get people back to face-to-face work hampered by the rapid spread of the highly transmissible omicron variant.

Citi has asked office workers who do not need to be present to support critical operations to work from home “in the first few weeks of the new year.” It took a slightly more relaxed approach than peers like Goldman, which brought people back, but with a greater degree of flexibility and offering more work-from-home days.

Citi management said it hoped a more flexible approach would be advantageous to recruiting in the Wall Street war for talent.

The vast majority of Americans subjected to workplace vaccination orders complied. For employers who adopted the orders, the percentage of workers vaccinated rose as much as 20 percentage points to around 90%, according to an October White House report.

Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves

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