BATON ROUGE, La. (Legal Newsline) - Louisiana hospitals can fire employees who refuse to get vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus, the state’s highest court ruled, rejecting arguments the vaccine mandate violated their right to privacy and refuse medical treatment.
Citing the state’s at-will employment doctrine, the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed an appeals court ruling and restored a trial judge’s dismissal of the lawsuit by 39 employees of University Health Shreveport. In the Jan. 7 decision, the court ruled that private employers are free to fire workers unless they are violating specific laws prohibiting discrimination according to race, sex, age and other classifications.
“Courts are not quasi-human resources departments that re-evaluate personnel decisions or the wisdom of those determinations, so long as there is no violation of `federal and state laws which proscribe certain reasons for dismissal of an at-will employee,’” the court observed in a footnote.
Citing the trial judge’s comments upon dismissing the University Health case, the court said: “Employers have this right, just like employers have the right if somebody wants to wear this particular T-shirt or they don’t want to wear the uniform, which is a freedom of speech, an employer can say ... you’re wearing our uniform or you’re not working here.”
Louisiana appeals courts had split on the question. University Health employees appealed their dismissal to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled they had been improperly denied a hearing and ordered the trial court to issue a temporary restraining order preventing anyone from getting fired. The Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal of a similar lawsuit by 47 employees against Ochsner Lafayette General, however. The state Supreme Court reversed the Second Circuit’s decision and upheld the Third.
“This case does not involve allegations of constitutionally prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, or religious belief, nor does it involve a statute that was adopted for the purpose of protecting an employee from termination under these circumstances,” the court ruled.
The employees argued they were protected by a Louisiana law allowing patients to refuse consent to a medical procedure. The Supreme Court rejected that argument, saying the employees weren’t patients of the hospital and it wasn’t their healthcare provider. The high court also rejected arguments based on the state constitutional right to privacy.