As part of President Joe Biden’s “COVID-19 action plan” announced last week, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is developing an “Emergency Temporary Standard” that will require employers of 100 or more employees to be fully vaccinated or require unvaccinated workers to undergo weekly testing before going to work.
The White House said the rule will impact more than 80 million unvaccinated workers in the private sector. Employers will be required to provide paid time off for workers to get vaccinated or recover from side effects of the vaccines.
“My message to unvaccinated Americans is this: What more is there to wait for? What more do you need to see?” President Biden said during an address Thursday evening. “We’ve made vaccinations free, safe and convenient. The vaccine is F.D.A. approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us. So, please, do the right thing.”
Brewers Association (BA) president and CEO Bob Pease told Brewbound that “it’s too early to say” how the rule will affect the organization’s membership. However, Pease expected it to be a topic of discussion during last week’s Craft Brewers Conference in Denver among the trade group’s various committees and board members.
“From a personal standpoint, I’m pro-vaccination,” Pease said. “We don’t have a mandate yet for BA staff or our employees, but we do have a mandate that if you want to come to our office, you need to be vaccinated. So I could see us getting behind that, but it’s too early to say.”
Asked what he anticipated the response would be from the BA’s membership to the rule, Pease responded: “all over the map like anything when it comes to government affairs.”
“If we’ve learned anything, it’s that you can’t put all 8,000 craft breweries in a box,” he said. “I think a lot of people will be supportive and certainly there’s going to be people that aren’t. We constantly remind ourselves that no matter your own personal leanings, it’s our job to represent our membership.”
Digging into the numbers though, Biden’s order likely won’t affect many craft brewers.
BA chief economist Bart Watson, citing the trade group’s annual survey and his own estimates, estimated that the median craft brewery employment size was 12 workers and the average brewery employed 16 workers, which he noted is “probably down a bit from the year before.”
Those numbers track with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which includes larger breweries in its count, and found that the average brewery employed 16 workers, Watson added.
“My back of the envelope is that this will cover about 1% of breweries (though that might be 10-15% of craft employees),” he added.
A day after Biden’s speech, the National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) issued a memo to its members saying the trade org expects the requirements to face legal challenges in court — something promised by several Republican governors. The NBWA noted that “incentives for businesses and employees as well as policies that encourage vaccinations and testing remain important to the effort to protect the public and the nation’s workforce.”
“However, mandates on Main Street businesses could have significant unintended consequences as vaccine-resistant employees seek employment at firms not subject to the mandate or choose to stay home,” the NBWA added. “And as business owners continue to deal with the disruption from COVID-19 and as efforts to return the economy to a sense of normalcy remain a challenge, labor shortages continue to plague the supply chain.”
The NBWA said it has reached out to business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and senior officials in the Department of Labor to discuss details of the rule and the process moving forward.
“NBWA will also be reviewing the impact of this order on beer distributors and the industry’s workforce and raising these concerns,” the group added.
How soon OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard would be published in the Federal Register and implemented remains unclear, although the NBWA pointed to a $14,000 fine per violation that is expected to be included in the rule. The NBWA also noted that the 100-employee count would be tallied per company, not by location or worksite.
National Association of Manufacturers President and CEO Jay Timmons issued a statement saying the trade group will work with the Biden administration “to ensure any vaccine requirements are structured in a way that does not negatively impact the operations of manufacturers that have been leading through the pandemic to keep Americans safe.”
“It is important that undue compliance costs do not burden manufacturers, large and small alike,” he added, while citing the vaccines’ role in reducing hospitalization and saving lives. “But it is also an economic imperative in that our recovery and quality of life depend on our ability to end this pandemic.”
Other trade groups, including the Consumer Brands Association, are asking for clarity on how private businesses should implement the president’s plan to reach “our shared goal of increased vaccination rates,” The New York Times reported.
More clarity and guidance is expected to come from the White House on September 24.
In another move that is likely to have some effect on beer industry sales, President Biden called on entertainment venues such as sports stadiums and arenas, concert venues and other large gathering spaces to require patrons to be vaccinated or provide a negative test for entry.