HR, Big Companies and the Outsourcing of the Covid State
The recent, unnerving revelations by Sean Burke about unvaccinated Environment Protection Authority staff being forced out of their jobs were jolting for New South Welshmen.
https://politicom.com.au/jobs-threat-as-nsw-cracks-down-on-mandates/
It begs the question, just how widespread are employment-related vaccine mandates in the Rum Corps State? The NSW Premier’s unspoken endorsement of, or at least his tame acquiescence in, all of this largely hidden Covid Fascism – it has been well and truly off the front pages – says plenty about his priorities and his core beliefs attachment to his core beliefs. And the emerging picture is not reassuring, especially for those who placed faith in him, based on his stated principles and what we know of his background. He has been in the job long enough now to make some assessments of his performance on the issues that matter to his base.
So, it transpires from one of the Premier’s Department letters to an unvaccinated employee of the NSW Public Service that we are now facing a “new normal”. The agency’s words. Second, it emerges that “many” NSW Government agencies impose vaccine mandates on their staff. Not just front-line health workers. Oh no. Perhaps just about everyone on the public sector payroll. Third, and astonishingly, the Premier’s Department was also at pains to point out that that it was NOT the Premier’s Department imposing the vaccine mandates on agency staff. This is an astonishing admission to make, unless one takes the cynical view that it is precisely and strategically stated in order to give the Premier a let-out clause. Plausible deniability when Nuremberg Two finally comes around and politicians are, one hopes, in some way held to account.
One assumes that “fully vaccinated” for NSW Government employees will mean boosters, third, fourth, and yes, apparently a fifth, and who knows how many more after that.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10520621/Australians-need-five-doses-Covid-vaccine.html
All this comes as the faith of governments all over the world in the capacity of non-pharmaceutical Covid measures in “stopping the spread” is utterly collapsing, and where vaccine mandates, too, are being withdrawn or wound back. It also comes at a time of real and worsening staff shortages across many professions and industries. It also comes at a time when we have incontrovertible evidence that unvaccinated emergency workers were excluded from helping in the Northern New South Wales and Queensland flood disasters. A wickedly unacceptable policy has no, therefore, become tragedy and farce rolled into one.
https://www.facebook.com/tanyadaviesmulgoa
One wonders, too, just how many other NSW employers are enforcing vaccine mandates, in the “freedom of choice” State. I know that NSW universities promote the lunacy of Covid Safe ideology, the new official State religion. Schools we know about. Child care centres, no doubt. BHP, for goodness sake.
How many other workplaces are sacking or in some way excluding the unvaccinated? We know that huge numbers of people are resigning from their jobs. Perhaps most are involuntary. Why are not journalists asking? How different is New South Wales from Victoria and Western Australia, the Covid pariah States? God knows what risks EPA employees pose to members of the general public, many of whom have now got Omicron/Covid, or are said (falsely) to be protected through vaccination. Ramesh Thakur has written on Australia’s massive up-tick in Covid infections AFTER the vaccines arrived in numbers. In particular, he asks:
… does the country, or any private company or public entity including a university, really want to lock itself into a never-ending cycle of boosters, which is a very real prospect both on overseas trends and also on the numbers of vaccine doses Australia has already purchased or ordered?
Apparently, they do.
How many employers are insisting on vaccinations? The American Covid sceptic stalwart Tom Woods points out:
The virus psychosis is alive and well among private employers.
Even when policymakers across the globe are finally catching on, or at least are feeling forced to loosen the rules, human resources-driven employers everywhere are doubling down, and it doesn’t seem to matter what the government in any jurisdiction might say or believe. HR departments seem to have taken turbo-charged doses of the Covid Kool-Aid. The safetyism that has taken over the world and public culture these past two years is utterly embedded in workplaces, especially among corporates.
Janet Albrechtsen has written recently of the general malaise of HR departments:
Indeed, I am routinely swamped with growing concerns from people at all levels inside companies who are too afraid to speak out about dreadful practices of HR departments. Many are too afraid to expose the malign influence of HR executives as powerful and capricious arbiters of culture, where mere allegation is enough to end careers. Too afraid to point out how easily HR departments can bully a chief executive, board and employees alike.
“Human resources” doesn’t get to the heart of what these departments do now. They have become corporate police departments armed with vaguely drafted internal codes of conduct to enforce, often capriciously, their version of morality.
Many of these departments are staffed overwhelmingly by women. Those who propagate diversity are the least diverse. They are the only corporate groups immune from gender quotas but paradoxically might benefit most from different perspectives, the best kind of diversity.
This isn’t just a New South Wales, or even just an Australian problem. It is a global phenomenon. It is no coincidence (as they say) that the World Economic Forum has “public private partnerships” as its mantra. The corporate sector has been up to its ears in Covid mania. Lucy Burton is The London Telegraph’s Banking Editor. Her headline states:
Bosses are about to become the next Covid rule makers.
The shift in responsibility from the Government to individuals will not be easy in workplaces given how the virus has divided Britain.
She states:
As the PM [Boris Johnson] finally rids himself of this virus and heads off to never-never land, companies must accept that they are the new Covid rule makers.
Indeed. And it isn’t just about working from home and self-isolating when ill. It is about the basic right to work for many.
One of Tom Woods’ American readers reported:
I was let go from my executive job at one of the "big 3" global major record labels yesterday because I am not vaccinated. I have 3 months left of (remote) employment should I stay. I was hired during the pandemic in August 2020.
I quote from my official letter from HR: "Even if you were prepared to wear a mask, social distance and/or submit to regular COVID-19 testing, this would not adequately mitigate the direct threat of illness to you, your coworkers, or the third parties with whom you are expected to interact as part of your job without an undue burden on our business operations."
I knew my days were numbered when the company sent out a very stern internal email top of November with a deadline for filing a religious exemption (which I did immediately) and a deadline for submitting a vaccination card. They even waived the carrot of an additional 4 days off during the holidays for compliance. In bold letters they said, "your employment will be at risk" and "all new hires are required to be vaccinated as a condition of employment."
They have since announced that boosters are required after 5 months of initial vaccination. With a planned reopening in February, that's a lot of paper to chase.
Then there is the vaccine segregation. There are ways of making corporate life miserable, short of sacking people. Here is another of Tom Woods’ hundreds of readers with dystopian tales from corporate USA:
But when that policy came, it was strict and unforgiving. It's effectively segregation. In company policy documents, unvaccinated employees are referred to as threats to the vaccinated. Unvaccinated persons are barred from company premises and from associating in-person at all with their coworkers on company time or on the company dime. There was and is no testing option available. It's vax or nothing.
… It's important to note that none of my coworkers actually cared about my vax status. If it had just been up to them, I would have been welcome. But because of paranoid, idiotic corporate overlords and VPs who openly admitted they were terrified about being around someone who hadn't taken the jab despite being triple-vaxxed themselves, I had to sit on my friend's couch and attend these meetings over zoom while everyone else 3 miles away was in an office setting again.
What about the US Supreme Court decision outlawing Biden’s vaccine mandates for corporates? Not universal relief, alas, as The Defender notes:
After the U.S. Supreme Court last month froze the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for large private employers, some companies — including Boeing, General Electric and Starbucks — dropped plans to implement the mandate.
Others, based on guidance issued in 2020 by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, left the mandates in place.
Most of the large employers that opted to mandate COVID vaccines for their employees, even though the Supreme Court ruled they didn’t have to, have something in common: BlackRock and The Vanguard Group have ownership stakes in them.
The last point is a whole other discussion. It is sufficient to note that many corporates are owned or controlled by investors who also invest in drug companies. It is the bottom line talking here. Principle comes last, even principle mandated by the highest court in the land.
BlackRock and Vanguard don’t just benefit from sales of COVID vaccines. As it turns out, they also have ownership stakes in technology companies developing vaccine passports and digital wallets.
Big Tech again. And the perfect alignment of woke belief systems and corporate greed. The list of American companies which have mandated vaccines for their workers is a long, long list. A who’s who of corporate America, across all sectors. Companies, too, with global reach. With offices everywhere. Read the list and see just how much the Covid pandemia and its associated vaccine religion is driven by the private sector. Referring simply to the Covid State is to miss much that has been going on, and to be alarmed at our prospects of leaving the Covid State behind us, even as governments the world over are now nervously re-assessing their blunders and cruelty. This is now a Vanguard/Blackrock-led pandemia.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/corporate-vaccine-mandates-passports-blackrock-vanguard/
Here is just one example, from Citigroup:
Danielle Thornton was in the school pick-up line waiting for her children when she learned she would face a life-changing choice: get the Covid-19 vaccine or lose her job of almost nine years at the bank Citigroup.
She and her husband had watched for months as bosses across the US introduced vaccine mandates, knowing the family might face this moment. Then, in the form of an email on her phone, it arrived.
"We had many, many conversations about it," she says. "But ultimately we decided that our freedom was more important than a pay cheque."
Danielle is one of thousands of people across America opting to lose their job rather than get the Covid-19 jabs.
They represent a small minority. Most employers that have introduced such rules - about a third of the country's biggest companies and 15% of small businesses - say the vast majority of their staff have complied.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60001143
The land of the free? The rule of law? Democratic exceptionalism? Nope, no protections for Danielle. (The BBC’s insistence on a “small minority” is self-serving rubbish. The narrative that the resistance is “tiny” has been going all the way through the pandemia. At the time of writing, just 64.9 per cent of Americans were double vaccinated, with 79.5 per cent in Australia).
The extent to which corporates are insisting that their workers sign on to the “Covid safe mantra” is truly, well, corporate. It is as if HR departments the world over were simply waiting for this thing. To give them a new meaning and work schedule. And the corporatised unions love all the Covid safe rubbish as well. When you add bureaucrats to the mix, you are asking for bureaucracy. Covid Safe bureaucracy.
And we need to remember that now public sector agencies, in line with the New Public Management thinking initiated in New South Wales by Nick Greiner and his side-kick Gary Sturgess in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are just about as corporatised and woke as anyone can get. The urge of public sector agencies to out-business the business world is palpable.
As many of Tanya Davies MP’s readers have reminded her, it isn’t much use being able to visit Kmart if you don’t have a job. And it seems that the Fair Work Commission is no protection. The Human Rights bureaucracies are a joke. They enforce identity rights that do are farcical and ignore rights that are fundamental and are looking the other way when abuses of real rights are actually occurring right in front of us. The legal system continues to oppose basic workers’ rights, from corporate lawyers who give advice to employers to employer groups. Here is but a sample (from the CPA Australia):
For many Australians, the daily commute to work has involved a quick trip from one room of the home to another. However, as COVID-19 vaccination levels continue to rise, more workers will be heading back to the office.
Employers are obliged to protect employee health and safety, but can you insist that employees be vaccinated?
To help answer this question for public practitioners, CPA Australia is consulting Maddocks Lawyers to develop a COVID-19 vaccination policy and other resources. These documents will set out employers’ health and safety obligations and legal requirements when considering a vaccination mandate for employees.
Catherine Dunlop, Partner, Employment, Safety & People at Maddocks, is working with CPA Australia on the resource development.
She says mandatory vaccinations depend largely on health and safety obligations, especially with ongoing community transmission in states such as Victoria and New South Wales.
Ah, health and safety, the ideology that has captured the world now for decades and determined that so much of life is now out-of-bounds. But now we must add to the mix not just safetyism but pro-vaxx ideology. Here is the legal advice to the CPA and, by extension, its members:
“When we translate that into a COVID-19 Delta world, the best protections we have are vaccinations in addition to measures like cleaning, wearing a face mask and social distancing,” Dunlop says.
“Vaccination doesn’t prevent transmission and it can’t prevent someone getting sick but, based on the advice and the evidence that’s currently available, it’s the very best measure of protection. If it’s justified on health and safety grounds, employers can issue a lawful and reasonable direction that employees must be vaccinated.
“As a result, employers’ health and safety obligations tend more towards mandatory vaccination in those states than they did previously.”
https://www.cpaaustralia.com.au/public-practice/inpractice/can-you-mandate-staff-vaccinations
At least she acknowledged the limited efficacy of vaccines, without, alas, also recognising that, in terms of the rights and obligations of workers, this should be a deal-breaker for vaccine mandates. They are evil AND they do not work. The idiocy of the mantra “you must be vaccinated so my vaccination works” is embedded in society, thanks to all the propaganda and lies, and employers are caught in the crossfire. Who would ever expect them to stand up and be counted, especially corporates that are governed by HR culture.
As Lucy Burton noted, with society “split” over Covid and vaccine mandates in particular, corporates have to decide where to place their chips, both in the face of likely worker safetyism and customer safetyism. Do they stand up against the Covid zeitgeist and stand with individual rights, or do they cave? I am not optimistic, despite the evident shift in global public sentiment towards Covid totalitarianism.
With lines blurred, governments still spruiking vaccine ideology – despite the also emerging evidence that they are both dangerous and ineffective – and employers being both woke AND turning to jelly in the face of perceived legal complexity, legislators need to step in and step up and make it straightforward for employers. Not likely in the current political climate in Australia, with politicians and their corporate (mainly Murdoch, the ABC and the Nine-Fairfax cabal) often leading the charge in the othering of the unvaccinated.
This is why Ron DeSantis’s example in Florida is so important. The Governor of Florida recently noted at CPAC that his State had refused “to outsource Faucism to big companies”. DeSantis understands what it is to be a leader, a statesman, not merely a politician. Australia is, sadly, full of the latter. In fact, DeSantis stated that, had Florida not led the way, the USA might have ended up looking “like Canada or Australia”. Oh dear.
It is one thing for governments, and the Australian Prime Minister (till May) to say, “we don’t discriminate on the basis of medical apartheid”. The Governor of Florida has made it illegal for anyone to so discriminate. Anything short of this is hollow when you have half the employers in the country shutting out the unvaccinated. Like the EPA is doing, on Dominic’s watch. (And, mercifully, Florida is not alone in the USA. Montana, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Iowa, Utah, and others have imposed some form of restrictions on employment-based vaccine mandates).
But the forces of freedom are still in the minority when it comes to resisting corporates. GloboCap, as CJ Hopkins calls the new world order, is firmly in place. New Normal fascism. The powers that be (TPTB) do not mean to loosen the grip, whatever governments are saying or doing. Independently own small businesses will struggle to survive the globalist, corporatist revolution under way. As will workers. The traditional mediating institutions that might once have risen up to preserve our way of life – the Church, unions, the family, communities – already under extreme pressure before Covid, have been eviscerated. Supply chains are shot. Federations are fragmented beyond recognition. Civility has been replaced by sneering and dobbing. Law enforcement now terrorizes citizens. Just look at the jokes told among themselves by Ottawa cops (wherever they came from) about their brutalising and smashing of the people in the streets. A new chaos is emerging. The law is no longer a refuge from tyranny.
At a rational policy level, the Cult narrative is collapsing. As CJ Hopkins suggests:
The official narrative is dead, or dying. The Covidian Cult is coming apart. No one but the most fanatical New Normals believes there is any real justification for imposing mandatory “vaccination,” “quarantine camps,” segregation of “the Unvaccinated,” or any of the other “Covid restrictions.” “The virus” is no longer an excuse for mindlessly following ridiculous orders and persecuting those of us who refuse.
Apocalyptic Pandemic Theater is over.
https://consentfactory.org/2022/02/20/the-naked-face-of-new-normal-fascism/
Good news, then? And when combined with the growing protest movements around the world, surely we can be optimistic. Oh no, not at all. For TPTB, this is simply the end of the beginning. The next phase is for the corporates to take up the slack, drive employment-based discrimination and sackings, and so further embed the division of society into two camps. If you ever wanted to foment a civil war, this would be a mighty good way of doing it.
I would be taking all the shallow platitudes of our “leaders” about the coming freedom with a proverbial grain of salt. (ScoMo, of course, is the very best at this. But he isn’t alone). Just ask an employee of IBM, Delta Airlines, Microsoft, Netflix, Deloittes, Nike, PwC, Salesforce, Twitter, Uber, Amtrak, American Express, Walmart, Walt Disney, United Airlines, the New York Times, McDonalds, Google, Goldman Sachs, Ford, Citigroup … I said it was a long, long list. As Tom Woods says, corporate America (and corporate everywhere) has signed on to the dystopia. For all of the reasons outlined above.
The efforts of the brave in Australia are ramping up, on the back of the recent, astonishing public protest movements. Witness the revived efforts of Tanya Davies MP in New South Wales and the ongoing, outstanding work of Mark Latham, George Christensen, Craig Kelly and Senators Roberts, Antic and Rennick.
What are our democratically elected governments going to do about this, I wonder? As with everything else, our Prime Minister and Premiers fall well short of what is required. As Tom Penn at TCW Defending Freedom argues, not only must the Covid mandates end, but those responsible for the carnage of the past two years must be held accountable. They must “do penance”.
AS President Xi Jinping of China continued to pursue his brutally absurd zero Covid strategy, for whatever reason of his own, throwing some of the world’s most heavily populated regions into strict lockdown as ‘surging virus cases prompted the return of mass tests and hazmat-suited health officials to streets on a scale not seen since the start of the pandemic’, the obedient media parrots, the UK, by contrast, finally threw open its borders as if the last two years of similarly ruinous measures were but a dream.
But the last two years were not a dream. They were not even a nightmare. They were instead a nightmarish reality, the painful damage of whose resultant, scandalous public health crimes is in real danger of being forgotten for good, until next time perhaps, but leaving us a more compliant and obedient as well as a heavily vaccinated people.
No, they must not be allowed to forget. They must not be allowed to encourage US to forget, distracted as people now are by the next wave of natural disasters and unspeakable wars. Will there even be an inquiry into Australia’s fascist Covid responses?
Otherwise, the recent fate of the little-lamented Liberal Government of South Australia will be repeated in many other places.
Paul Collits
23 March 2022