Government employers have increasingly begun issuing vaccine mandates as the nation’s mass vaccination campaign encounters public resistance and a highly contagious new variant surges across the country.  On Monday the Department of Veteran Affairs became the first federal agency to adopt a vaccine mandate, requiring that the nearly 115,000 employees in its sprawling healthcare network receive the jab within two months.  And at the subfederal level California and New York City mandated vaccination for nearly one million public sector employees on Monday.  Reactions to the NYC mandate exhibit the tension the issue presents for union leaders, confronted with the dueling imperatives of ensuring safe workplaces while resisting employer encroachments on their members’ bodily autonomy.  The largest municipal workers union has opposed the requirement, while the city’s teachers unions have largely expressed support.

In May the Republican governor of North Dakota, billionaire Doug Burgum, captured media attention and spearheaded a movement when he announced that his state would no longer provide enhanced benefits to unemployed individuals, asserting that the enhancement had driven up unemployment.  This trailblazing action prompted nearly two dozen GOP-controlled states to discontinue their participation in the federally funded program.  But a series of recently unearthed documents reveals that Burgum’s decision was based not on careful economic analysis but, as a progressive news outlet in the state casts it, “crass political calculus.”  The outlet reports that a presentation prepared by state officials shortly before Burgum’s announcement acknowledged the significant economic benefits resulting from the enhanced benefits and concluded that any evidence of inhibited hiring was “anecdotal.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the state’s withdrawal from the program has not unleashed hiring.  In fact, it has not disturbed the state’s unemployment rate at all.  This aligns with emerging research increasingly indicating that, for predictable reasons, curbing the enhanced payments has failed to increase employment.