From: ^Human Resources Internal Communications <Human.Resources.Internal.Communications@ssa.gov>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2021 7:20 AM
To: ^Human Resources Internal Communications <Human.Resources.Internal.Communications@ssa.gov>
Subject: COVID-19 Vaccination Mandate
MESSAGE TO ALL SSA EMPLOYEES:
In accordance with the President’s Executive Order on Requiring Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination for Federal Employees, all employees must be fully vaccinated (i.e., receive a single dose vaccine or the second shot of a two-dose vaccine, excluding booster shots) by November 22. Employees must therefore have received their final vaccine dose by November 8. Two of the three vaccines being administered in the US have two-dose regimens. Therefore, employees will need to start vaccination by the following dates in order to be fully vaccinated by the November 22 deadline:
|
|
Moderna |
Pfizer-BioNTech |
Johnson & Johnson |
|
First Shot |
Oct. 11, 2021 |
Oct. 18, 2021 |
Nov. 8, 2021 |
|
Second Shot |
Nov. 8, 2021 |
Nov. 8, 2021 |
n/a |
|
Fully Vaccinated |
Nov. 22, 2021 |
Nov. 22, 2021 |
Nov. 22, 2021 |
All employees will be required to provide documented proof of vaccination (e.g., a copy of the record of immunization from a health care provider or pharmacy, COVID-19 Vaccination Record Card, medical records documenting the vaccination, immunization records from a public health or state immunization information system, etc.). Employees should take steps now to schedule a vaccination if they have not already done so or preserve their proof of vaccination if already vaccinated. Please do not email your vaccine documentation to your supervisor. Additional instructions will follow concerning collection of your documentation. Employees will receive duty time of up to 4 hours per vaccination shot (up to 8 hours total for two-shot vaccines) rather than administrative leave to complete the vaccination process; other policies concerning administrative leave for vaccination reactions and to take family members for vaccination will continue unchanged.
At this time, we have discontinued the SSA Vaccination Attestation survey and removed access to the survey link.
Employees who are unable to be vaccinated for medical reasons may request a reasonable accommodation with appropriate medical evidence including showing why they cannot be vaccinated. Employees may request a reasonable accommodation through the Reasonable Accommodation (RA) Wizard, from their supervisor via email using SSA Form 501, or orally and supervisors will enter the request into the RA Wizard. Employees may also request a religious accommodation from their supervisor. Supervisors must consult with OGC concerning religious accommodation requests. Employees who fail to comply with the vaccination requirement by the deadline or apply for and receive an accommodation will be subject to discipline up to and including termination.
Thank you.
45 comments:
As a fully vaccinated employee I have to say this mandate is unconscionable and repugnant.
As a fully vaccinated employee I have to say this mandate is necessary and overdue.
People will apply for and get the reasonable accommodations or quit or get fired.
In the end, none of it really matters because service to the public will be the only real casualty.
@7:59 There are numerous opportunities for work in the private sector where vaccines are not required.
The same right wing agitators crying to federal court about "the unitary executive" are now appalled that the same unitary executive is setting rules for executive branch employees.
Go get em, Joe.
Dont like it quit. Guess what, your skills there transfer about nowhere. Should have happened in the Spring.
You think service is poor at SSA right now...wait until they fire a bunch of people unwilling to vaccinate. SSA won't be up to speed again for another 3-4 years.
They wont quit. They will fuss and bluster, but in the end they will do like the majority of employees across the country and get the shot. If they dont, who cares, they will be gone. They are not irreplaceable, just cogs and there are always people wanting these jobs.
If I had a dollar for every time we were threatened with a mass exit of ssa staff I could retire now and never read this blog again. Not one of them has ever come true.
Many experienced retirees may be willing to help bridge the gap. Any Public employee who refuses vaccination for reasons other than a medical condition making the vaccine adverse, (religious exception is nuts), deserves to be fired. Several cases across the country have already been heard concerning vaccine mandates by employers, and they are all being upheld, as they should be. Thus, you have nothing on which to stand and fight against vaccination. The vaccination has already been taken by millions with only isolated incidents of adverse side effects, and no one has died from the vaccination, so we know it is safe; the vaccine is continuously being analyzed by top infectious disease specialists world wide, and the vaccine is entirely consistent with vaccine history and everything we know about vaccines. You all had vaccines based on the same science to go to school. Did you, or your parents, object then?
What really gets me is the anti-vaxxers who refuse the vaccine but are more than willing to take such things as monoclonal anti-body treatment and Ivermectin, a horse dewormer, neither of which prevent getting or spreading the deadly, highly contagious virus, but only treat certain symptoms, and most importantly, far less scientifically studied than the vaccine. Folks, we’re never going to return to normal until we eradicate the virus with heard immunity, which will never be achieved with so many stupid people refusing to be vaccinated. I cannot even begin to wrap my mind around any healthcare or Public Sector workers refusing the vaccine. Your logic is idiotic and has no basis in science, reality or fact.
Freedom isn’t free. Your personal freedom to choose whether to get the vaccination has never been an issue here. We send men & women to war knowing they may pay the ultimate sacrifice so we can have freedom at home. We all have certain responsibilities to our fellow citizens and the right to live in a free society. Accept your responsibility to the community around you and get the vaccination. I am sick & tired of all this whining & crying by the anti-vaxxers. You come across like a bunch of sorry piss ants. I have no empathy for you, as is the case with other millions of vaccinated folks. Enough is enough already!
no one is getting fired, when push comes to shove your gonna get a shot before you lose your career.
Those of you who think SSA employees can be easily replaced if they quit or retire due to this mandate, are completely wrong.
It takes several years for an Operations employee to learn to do their job well even after they are trained.
Workers' compensation offset issues, for example, are extremely complex and each state has their own laws.
If SSA mandates this vaccine then orders employees back to the office I fear there will be a mass exodus of experienced and knowledgeable SSA employees.
It may make you feel good to say "let them go" but this does nothing to address the upcoming retirement and resignation SSA tidal wave, which could be a disaster for the agency and the public we serve. It would take years to recover.
There's no threat. I was just pointing out an issue if people do quit or get fired for refusing the vaccine. Honestly I could care less myself...I'm vaxxed and it doesn't affect me specifically but it will only hamper service to the public if the agency loses more people. That's why I said it would hurt the agency for a few years because sure they can hire a ton of people...and who knows, maybe they will. But it will take a while for them to get up to speed. Not to mention, lots of new hires end up quitting because the job is not what they thought it would be.
@1219 Perhaps religious exemption is nuts to you but a small number of employees may disagree. All 3 vaccines use fetal cell lines from abortions to either test or manufacture the vaccines.
Re no deaths--I am pretty sure there were a very small number of deaths of young adult males associated with the vaccine. In their instance, the risk of the vaccine is close to the risk of getting Covid and dying. It's very tiny risk for both but some may opt to take their chances with natural immunity.
Re masses quitting--I doubt that but a few, up to maybe 1-2% may quit or retire early,and if they are very experienced that will be a notable loss.
LMAO! Many retirees out here with all this knowledge and more. I anticipate many willing to bridge the gap if necessary. Seriously, choosing not to Vaccine is a LOSING, WRONG CHOICE ON EVERY LEVEL. The only exception is a medical condition that makes getting the vaccine worse. What in the world are all you anti-vaxxers so worried about at this point? Every argument I have read and heard from all of you are baseless. The courts across the country are supporting the employers overwhelmingly. You haven’t a leg in which to stand to fight this. As I stated earlier, freedom is not free. We all have responsibility to our fellow citizens. Get the vaccine and move on with life.
Something tells me the people simply unwilling to get the vaccine secondary to nonsense reasons like right-wing propaganda are employees Social Security and its service population willing to use. They clearly lack judgment, basic reasoning abilities, and any sense of acting in the common good. They are also necessarily people more outraged at the idea of getting a shot than the hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens who have died from COVID-19. That denotes real character problems. If there is an exodus, it will likely serve only to get incompetent, selfish employees out of the way of competent, mission-focused ones.
Do we really want people who by definition do not understand the law, science, or collective purpose administering a public benefits program? No thanks!
You might see some folks who were already retirement eligible and who would have been given the slight nudge needed to put in their papers by any number of SSA actions take retirement in the coming months due to the vax mandate. Just like you might see some folks retire due to being called back in (I would think this would be the biggest driver of otherwise-not-happening retirements and resignations). Or due to cruddy new telework agreements with the agency. SSA has a lot of folks in the KMA Club, and the reasons that make them retire differ widely. This will be a very small bucket in the group of all buckets of reasons why folks go.
Remember--SSA and the Gov't generally are through the worst of the boomer retirement wave writ large and as others have pointed out, despite all the fuss and noise and smoke, there has been terribly little in the way of fire when it comes to those threatening to quit their employment due to vaccine mandates once they are actually put on the spot (why just the other day I saw a spate of articles crying about "dozens" of Massachusetts Troopers quitting over their vax mandate, and then after all that news hit the police union or some such with the actual data revealed, oh actually it's only been one. One!).
I expect the same thing here--nothing more than a very noisy blip. Get the shot(s) or quit/be fired, the outcome is preordained here. And comfortable enough economic/material conditions are quite valuable and scarce to a lot of folks once they really start thinking about it.
I'm a retiree and in the let them quit camp. Immunocompromised, exemptions all day long. Religious? That one is likely specious in 85-90% of those who will claim it, messing it up for the 10% who are actually in a valid religious space. You can't come to school without your shots, you can't come to work without your shots. And I'm frankly not afraid of losing the caliber of people who will walk due to this. I mean, they likely eat hotdogs, maybe scrapple, crabs, drive cars on the highway with a license, likely complain if someone walked into a restaurant without a shirt or shoes yet have the perception this vaccine is different. If that's where their head is at, I'm guessing that they may not be the brightest bulb in the pack, and not someone so pivotal that SSA falls apart. I've a friend whose son in law is at the Pentagon as a fed "who knows things we just don't know" and is telling his new bride that he may not be working shortly because he's gonna quit. I say DOD and SSA are better off without those folks in the long run. I just hope the religious exemption thing doesn't turn into a farce. Think we could use the same techniques used on conscientious objectors in WW2? Or would the right wing scream about religious persecutions?
Monoclonal antibody treatment also uses fetal cell lines. The reason I don’t buy the religious exception is that it makes no sense in the middle of an extremely deadly, highly contagious virus. I don’t know of any legitimate religion that would recommend not to be vaccinated unless they are on the fringe.
Maybe a big turnover would be a good thing.
Hear me out.
Yeah there would be some pain, but you would be getting rid of the right people and replace them with younger workers at a lower rate. You can then train them the right way and not get the "this isnt how we used to do it and I am going to do it the way we did it 30 years ago."
The basic stuff is still going to get done the way it always does, and that is the vast majority of stuff. The things that already take longer because they are complicated and out of the norm will still take longer because they are complicated and out of the norm.
Since there has never been one single birth where someone was born all knowing about SSA processing, it can be taught and will be taught.
Let them go, I am okay with that they are the problem not the solution.
Young does not necessarily make a worker better! Many retirees possess a great repertoire of knowledge about the work they performed. This really hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the technology. They can teach what must be learned. Many, no doubt, can do both. Your ageism is not welcome!
There is only one religious organization of any size that ever objected to vaccines, the Christian Scientists. And even they say it is an individual choice. https://www.christianscience.com/press-room/a-christian-science-perspective-on-vaccination-and-public-health
AS tot he feat cell lines, my feeling is that most people claiming to be so concerned with their use never knew of their use before yesterday and don't know how they were used for vaccines or in many other areas of medicine. And, they certainly don't seem to care that the Pope and the Church has made it clear this is not a basis for rejecting the vaccine. https://www.catholicnews.com/vatican-without-alternatives-current-covid-19-vaccines-are-morally-acceptable/
What many of you are missing is that SSA employees have been working at home for about 19 months. The number who have become newly retirement eligible during this 19 month time period, is huge. I'd guess at least 20 percent of SSA employees are now retirement eligible.
Now not all of them are going to walk away due to this vaccine order, but a lot of them will.
The way this "blast Email" was worded is also somewhat insulting and authoritative, they could have done a better job with the wording.
It is good to pull the weeds from the garden. The garden will thank you.
I have been sympathetic to the desires of SSA employees to continue remote work. However, as a member of the vaccinated majority, I have little sympathy for those who continue to refuse to be vaccinated. We have at least one fully approved vaccine and another which will probably be approved soon. You are not being "forced" to accept the vaccine. You are being forced to make a choice between accepting what has proven to be a very safe and effective vaccine or finding another job.
The good news for those who refuse the vaccination is that the job market in the private sector is pretty good now. The bad news is that many companies require vaccination. The further bad news is that you will not enjoy civil service or union protections at those jobs. Welcome to the private sector.
I am not really concerned about the affect on SSA. Some will decide to retire but I doubt those not eligible for retirement will opt to quit. There will be plenty of applicants for the open jobs at SSA.
4:10 PM I agree that some of these comments smack of ageism. My experience is that the best employees in Operations are usually the older ones with the knowledge of POMS and the experience of working claims and/or dealing with the public.
These employees SSA simply cannot afford to lose at least not all at once, via mass retirements or resignations. Accommodations should be made.
Employees age 60+ well the fact is that they should continue to telework on a permanent basis, and they should not have to get vaccinated. This will also protect the most vulnerable employees in case there is a variant which gets through all the vaccines.
For certain other technical SSA jobs such as those which require heavy computer programming skills, youth will be served. Those jobs are best done by younger employees.
United Airlines has 67,000 employees and after all of the huffing and puffing, only 594 of them are actually willing to be fired over a vaccine mandate. SSA has almost the same number of employees and I predict a similar outcome, less then one percent of employees will be stubborn and stupid enough to get themselves fired over this. That being said, I bet a lot of employees are scrambling to find themselves a Dr. Nick to support their phony reasonable accommodation requests, trying to get an exemption based on a fabricated medical condition.
The religious objection is not to vaccines. Some have been developed and tested without using fetal cells.
I am not one of them but the people I know who have religious objections have known about fetal line cells for years.
Thanks for the Catholic link but one should know an informed conscience trumps vaccine recommendations.
For those who think getting rid of the older employees, you will see eventually. Not all are good but most newbies don't know a combined family Max if it slapped them in the head. Simpler things like deemed filing elude them too. Limited pool of applicants well result in limited results.
The choice is simple, get vaccinated (unless there is a valid reason not to) or lose the job. Since so many people have died from COVID 19 and have been sick because of COVID19 it seems like the right thing and the selfless thing to get vaccinated. But, I guess that's too much to ask of so many people in our country. And, how sad that is.
Well they are not vaccinated, so it doesnt matter if they quit, bring them in and let them work and pay out the $255.
"insulting and authoritative" lol grow up. The second one is a given--they are the bosses and you are the employee. The first one...well, if you're insulted by anything in that email then you have to hold some pretty wild beliefs about the vaccine (none good).
In almost 30 years of service to SSA, this is the first time I have been absolutely ashamed to be associated with some co-workers, who have commented above. There are many people who have grave concerns about these shots, including high level managers, and your comments are ignorant and ill-informed. BTW - are we going to require proof of all other vaccines, to diseases much deadlier than COVID?
Personally fully vaccinated (3x).. so I don't really understand the fuss... I am a long tenured field employee w/ numerous health issues . Continuing to work remotely is my only option based on reasonable health issues. BTW 6:53 & 7:01 , if there is a mass exodus who do you think will train / mentor new employees. Despite conventional opinion one does not walk off the street and become a competent Claims Specialist (CS) formerly (CR) overnight !
I was a TII and TXVI CR (yep that long ago) and a Medicare Outreach Coordinator. I never found the job to be that hard. It just never lets up, it is a white collar assembly line job, just one after the other day in and day out. Most everything is pretty straight forward, they locked us in a room for IVT we came out three months later and went to work on the floor. We had an alpha in few months and it grew from there to a full load pretty quick. Most of the the stuff was pretty cut and dried, occasional A101 but not every claim, sometimes more development for a lost spouse or a surprise pop up DAC during a retirement, but nothing that HARD. The problem was you had more of the straightforward to do instead of being able to finish up the problem claim. It wasnt hard, there just wasnt time to do it.
I left SSA and went to work for a DIB Mill, did about 10000 cases over five years, again, not hard, not taxing, just boring and repetitive. Extremely repetitive and boring, and anyone that remembers paying for internet leads from a couple large companies out there knows how reputative and boring those lead reviews can be!
We need to get past this whole SSA is so hard you have to work here for 100 years to be able to do it thing. It just simply isnt true, its just that the avalanche doesnt wait for you to finish fixing the blips.
Would I go back to the agency? NOPE not enough money in the budget to pay me to do that kind of assembly line work ever again.
Spot on! Avalanche is right!!!! Add to that the training now is worse than it was in the past. Now you have new people adding blip on top of blip and no time to fix them.
I think the "problem cases" have become more common in the past 5-6 years than they were before. But you're correct in that the issue isn't really the complexity of the work. It has more to do with not having the time to actually make the needed corrections because you're buried under the sheer amount of work.
12:58 the Claims Specialist job is extremely difficult and takes years to learn. If you don't believe me just look at the current workers compensation offset and attorney fee sections of POMS.
Many years ago POMS did not have different rules for each state for workers' compensation, now each state has it's own rules. Just for New York WC with attorney expenses we had a 3 day training class earlier this year, learned to do an Excel worksheet to prorate the expenses correctly. California and Ohio WC are also difficult and employees often get assigned WC cases from states they are not familar with.
I wish you would stop posting about how you used to do SSA jobs years ago and how easy the jobs are. You have posted similar comments on multiple threads, and is insulting to SSA employees who know better. Plus you may be misleading people into thinking SSA employees are easily replaceable.
My TXVI training class included a college psych program drop out, a payment specialist with a local dib rep, a United Way special event coordinator, and a guy that was a shift manager at DQ. They all became CRs.
Also, people who work/worked for SSA who think claims handled isn't complicated are typically those who are not properly applying POMS. I have worked with several awful CSs who constantly screwed up but were convinced that they were doing a great job.
Given that DIB mills pay less than SSA, especially when given the Federal benefits package, that guy/gal probably left SSA due to performance issues.
7:37 Your post is right on the money. I work in a Congressional unit and spend most of my time fixing mistakes that CS made in the FO and PSC. Sometimes these errors are for many thousands of dollars. I've seen a false overpayment of $100,000 posted, which is more than my yearly salary!
I suspect the poster who thought his SSA job was easy was also providing the Congressional unit with his messed up cases to work.
The snowflakes will get vaccinated or leave, and if the latter, no one will miss them. Enough is enough. You want to work for the federal government, then suck it up and do what you have to do or go somewhere else.
Yeah, SSA has plenty of crappy CSs. You should know this considering that you worked for the agency.
It's a tough job if performed the right way.
I doubt any SSA employee will be missed for long, including myself. . However their expertise will be missed, their experience will be missed, and the work will not get done if many experienced and skilled employees leave at once. This should be avoided at all costs.
It takes years of on the job training to build up the skills and expertise to be a good CR or CA (now CS) : these jobs are the backbone of the agency.
No one cares about this enough to give up their retirement bennies.
Worth noting that AFGE is passing around "religious exemption" templates to SSA employees. Whose side is Ralph Dejuliis on?
I was in training this morning on a webex for the State of Illinois for Open Enrollment season. David Nuygne(sp) from SSA who is the outreach guy just said in the training that the failure rate for getting a MySSA account started is 50%. He also said they want more and more done online, while knowing HALF of the people cant get an account set up. He showed us charts of the people missing out on benefits for MSP and the numbers were staggering. He also said that they want the state aging and disability network to take SSI applications. The network is balking asking for more formal training.
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