Boston had the right to order employees to get Covid-19 shots, court says

The Supreme Judicial Court today upheld the city of Boston's 2021 order requiring municipal workers to get vaccinated against Covid-19, saying public-health needs outweighed the collective-bargaining rights of the police and fire unions that sued over the policy.

The ruling comes a bit late in that Boston has begun dropping the requirement in bargaining with some unions [link requires subscription], but city officials have said they want to preserve the right in future pandemics.

The court's reasoning begins:

Certain managerial decisions are exempted from collective bargaining obligations where such decisions, as a matter of public policy, must be reserved to the public employer's discretion.

The justices explained:

In December 2021, as the Omicron variant ran rampant throughout the Commonwealth, vaccination against COVID-19 was viewed as the only effective means by which the city and the mayor could combat the virus while still performing their public functions. According to the executive director of the city's public health commission, the continued practice of testing as an alternative to vaccination against COVID-19 would be insufficient to contain the spread of COVID-19 following the emergence of the Omicron variant. The defendants' policy decision to amend the COVID-19 policy was based on concerns not only for the health of their employees, but also for the residents of the city, for whom the defendants were obligated to provide continued access to public safety services.

Given the unique circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and its threat to the health and safety of the public, the decision to remove the testing alternative in the defendants' COVID-19 policy constituted a nondelegable policy decision that could not be the subject of decision bargaining because any such requirement would have impinged directly on the defendants' ability to provide essential public safety services to city residents.

The court continued that while the city and its public-safety unions had, earlier in the pandemic, agreed to let employees either get tested or undergo frequent testing, Omicron swept that out:

Whether there were possible alternatives to the amended COVID-19 policy that could have allowed the defendants to maintain the ability to provide these essential safety services to city residents without going so far as mandating vaccination against COVID-19 for all city employees, such as continued testing for COVID-19 for unvaccinated employees, is not the issue when identifying core managerial prerogatives. ...

[A]ny agreement to mandatory collective bargaining on an issue of public health and safety, in light of the emergency of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, likely would not have been enforceable as the defendants are "not free to bargain away certain elements of [their] nondelegable authority and responsibility to act for the public health, safety, and welfare," because "the public interest . . . impose[s] a necessary limitation upon the collective bargaining process."