Good Job on Vaccine Mandates, New York. Don’t Back Down.

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- New York City put 9,000 municipal workers on unpaid leave on Monday for refusing to comply with Covid-19 vaccine mandates. Well done.

Public and private sector leaders will have to continue enforcing mandates amid counterfactual protests from holdouts who are conflating sensible public health policy and the common good with a threat to their liberty and identity. New York is making tough, rational choices around mandates and following through — an exemplary stance akin to United Airlines Holdings Inc.’s approach. This helps keep residents, employees and customers safer and healthier and makes it easier for other leaders to follow suit.

It’s also clear that most workers subjected to New York’s mandates are complying. 

Some math: New York employs about 378,000 people, so Monday’s furloughs amount to just 2.4% of all the public workers who keep a city that has survived repeated labor battles, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the 2008 financial crisis and, thus far, a pandemic, moving forward. An additional 12,000 city workers have sought mandate exemptions on medical or religious grounds. All in, then, 21,000 workers remain unvaccinated — about 5.6% of the total workforce.

The vocal minority filmed by news crews as they protest at Gracie Mansion or tie up traffic marching across the Brooklyn Bridge are just that — a minority. They aren’t representative of most of their co-workers. A large portion of the dissenters are police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers. But even among their own colleagues, they also aren’t representative. About 2,500 police department employees, for example, are being furloughed, which is about 4.5% of the department’s total workforce.

Some 2,000 firefighters appear to be anti-mandaters and have gone on medical leave — or “irresponsible bogus sick leave,” as New York’s fire commissioner described it. Bogus or not, those involved in the sick-out are just 18% of the fire department’s uniformed force. Some 17% of the sanitation department’s workers are reportedly unvaccinated. Again, they’re speaking for themselves and not for most of their colleagues. Another benefit of the mandate deadline: It caused vaccination rates among all of these workers to soar over the past several days.

New Yorkers won’t know immediately what the full impact of furloughs and layoffs might be, though Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city isn’t experiencing disruptions. The New York Post reported that 26 of the city’s 341 firehouses had to close last weekend because of staffing shortages, but city officials disputed that account. They said that no firehouses had been fully closed and that firefighters were being shifted to new locations as needed. There have also been reports of garbage piling up on Staten Island and Brooklyn streets.

The police department said it isn’t worried that the city’s streets will go unpatrolled. “They came to work as they always do,” Police Commissioner Dermot Shea said, adding that furloughs were having “literally no effect on service at this point.” It’s possible that the contretemps over mandates may teach New York that it doesn’t need as many police officers, firefighters and sanitation workers as it has been fielding, and any layoffs that come out of this may allow the city to trim its payrolls without diminishing any essential services.

Policing is a flashpoint in the dustup over mandates because residents and voters have a visceral fear of unsafe streets. While widespread police walkouts have yet to accompany mandates in big cities, the head-butting is escalating. Police unions in Chicago and Los Angeles have sued to stop mayors in those cities from imposing mandates even though a large portion of cops there remain unvaccinated (and even though Covid-19 was the leading cause of on-the-job deaths for cops last year).

What is it about police forces that makes so many cops resistant to mandates? There are a lot of ways to try to answer that question. Bill Terrill, a former military police officer and criminologist at Arizona State University, said in a recent interview with a National Public Radio affiliate that it has everything to do with the culture of policing.

“Police officers like to tell people what to do, but they don’t like being told what to do,” he said. “And that’s a very deep cultural issue.”

“Much of police work is designed to get the public to comply with their orders,” Terrill added. “Compliance is a big part of policing. When someone doesn’t comply and there’s something like a use-of-force incident, oftentimes you’ll hear the police talk about ‘Well, all they had to do was comply.’ Yet in cases like [mandates] there’s resistance to compliance when it has to do with them as individuals.”

New York offered the country a painful and tragic lesson when Covid-19 began sweeping across the country early last year, and the city, a perennial survivor, is poised to offer another lesson as well.

“I’m going to say upfront to every mayor in America, to every governor in America, to every CEO of a company in America, go to a full vaccination mandate because it will allow us to end the Covid era once and for all,” de Blasio said on Monday. “We’ve got to end it. This is how we do it.”

The mayor is correct.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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