The 11 plaintiffs challenging the Steamship Authority’s COVID-19 vaccine requirement have won a small legal victory in the courts.
A panel of three circuit judges in the U.S. Court of Appeals, First Circuit, on Oct. 6, ruled that a lower court partially erred when rejecting the Steamship Authority [SSA] workers’ claims that their rights were infringed upon.
“The judgment of the District Court is affirmed in part and vacated in part,” the panel ruled. “We remand for further proceedings not inconsistent with this opinion.”
The panel’s decision will send the case back to the lower courts.
“The First Circuit ruled that my clients’ free-exercise claim under the First Amendment demonstrated a ‘likelihood of success,’ which is the first and most important of the four factors courts use to assess whether to grant requests for injunctive relief,” the attorney representing the plaintiffs, Patrick K. Daubert, said in a statement. “While the appellate decision affirmed the lower court’s denial of injunctive relief on the other counts in the complaint, in order for the injunction properly to have been issued, my clients only needed to prevail on one claim.”
Daubert said he and the plaintiffs are seeking reinstatement for the workers who were terminated for standing by their religious convictions in declining the vaccines.
The group of employees filed the 129-page lawsuit in Barnstable County Superior Court in February 2022, alleging the Steamship was infringing on their First Amendment rights as they relate to religious freedom.
The lawsuit outlines the group of 11 employees opposing the “one-size-fits-all” medical mandates, and instead willing to use other preventive measures, such as weekly testing and masking to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
The case was quickly moved to the U.S. District Court, where Judge Richard G. Stearns denied the workers’ request in March 2022.
The plaintiffs, naming themselves the Steamship Employees for Medical Freedom, are listed in the lawsuit as Capt. Albert Brox, Kim Fernandes, James Bondarek, Andrea Sheedy, Paul Menton, Christopher Ovaska, Mark Anderson, Timothy Richardson, Steven Ennis, Sonia Simoneau, and Jeffrey D’Amario. The plaintiffs hold a wide variety of jobs, such as captain, purser, parking lot cashier, terminal worker, oiler, ticket seller, and pilot. According to court records, some of the workers have since received the vaccine.
The group filed its appeal in April last year.
In their legal argument, they argued that their rights were infringed upon because another worker was given a medical exemption for the COVID-19 vaccine, while their religious exemption request was denied. The panel of three judges agreed that the first circuit court did not rule on the argument properly.
The Steamship “treated their religious beliefs less favorably than the religious beliefs of others. We understand them to be asserting only that the policy violates their free-exercise rights because the record shows that the policy’s medical exemption has been administered to treat comparably situated persons differently based on whether their request for an exemption is religious or medical in nature,” the Oct. 6 ruling from the panel of judges states.
The Steamship Authority declined to comment on the case, saying that proceedings are ongoing.
LET FREEDOM RING
Freedom from anti-vaxxer terrorists.
Look deeper. Things are not as they appear.
Just the usual malcontents.
Why is our tax dollars paying to defend the Steamship in violating their employees constitutional rights ?
It’s bad enough the employees lost their jobs over not taking the experimental and sometimes deadly jabs, but for the Steamship to continue to argue in a costly legal battle that they have the right to force vaccinate their employees is a huge case of bad judgement and waste of resources. The Steamship should hire these employees back and give them compensation for the time they were fired.
Where is the clause in the Constitution showing a right to not get a vaccine?
Tim– they essentially quit.
An employer has the right to set terms for employment.
You either abide by those rules or you get a different job.
In this booming Bidenomics economy, it’s easy.
For the same reason our tax dollars are being used to collect urine samples.
We want to fire irresponsible people.
Please show us the verifiable data that states the number of deaths caused by the covid vaccine. I have asked this question of others in the past. I never got a reply.
You can’t support an argument by just making things up. Sorry.
No one was forced to take the jab.
No one is forced to pee in a cup.
Not taking the jab resulted in job lose.
Not peeing in a cup results in job lose.
Do you want SSA jockeys to pee in a cup?
I want SSA jockeys to be jabbed.
We can’t always get what we want.
Tax dollars are being used to defend the SSA actions.
If the SSA does not prevail tax dollars will be used to pay off the “The Unclean”.
Your taxes will go up.
As a former employer things aren’t always as cut and dry as to employee/employer rights. There are protected classes that are exempt from certain job requirements. Some of those rights are negotiated in collective bargaining.
Drug tests and vax’s are taken and disclosed prior to offer of employment. I could not let one of my employees work on my hospital contract without proof of vaccine, chest X-ray drug test etc. Other contracts I couldn’t ask employees to take a drug test because it violated collective bargaining agreement.
The constitutional issue is first amendment freedom of religion, fourth amendment search and seizure and fifth amendment self incrimination for drug tests as an example.
As an employer I just can’t make a rule up and tell someone to abide by it or you’re fired. Just moving someone from one shift to another can be a violation of an employees rights. And I can’t just single someone out for drug testing. Try telling a mom of five that tough cookies I’m moving your shift to the overnight and if you don’t like it no one is forcing you to work here. I could site many other examples but I think it’s pretty clear it’s not that simple. If you make someone quit under threat of doing something that is hostile, illegal or immoral you will prevail in our courts. And rightly so.
The bottom line for the SSA, and the public, is that refusenicks are not the kind of people we want working for us
Good riddance to bad rubbish.