Google and Facebook are also both headquartered in Silicon Valley, a geographic area with one of the highest vaccination rates in the country. The courts have recently tossed out cases by people trying to sue hospitals and universities that have required vaccines. Under federal law, it’s been considered legal for employers to require employees to be vaccinated. “We continue to work with experts to ensure our return-to-office plans prioritize everyone’s health and safety,” wrote Goler in a partial statement. Both Google and Facebook said they will have a process for those who cannot be vaccinated for medical or other reasons. Lori Goler, VP of People at Facebook, released a statement saying that any of the company’s employees working in a US office will need to be vaccinated. Google also is letting some 20 percent of its employees permanently work from home, and 60 percent work a few days a week in person. Google is also pushing back the date when it will mandate employees to return to the office from September to October at the soonest, citing concerns about the delta variant. “I hope these steps will give everyone greater peace of mind as offices reopen,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post announcing the requirements. Netflix will also start mandating vaccines for all of its actors and on-set production staff, according to a report from Deadline on Wednesday. And other companies outside the tech industry are likely to follow. Now, these same companies are some of the first major employers in the private sector to mandate that employees be vaccinated before they return. Tech firms were some of the first workplaces to require employees to work from home at the beginning of the pandemic. So far, President Biden has not placed a federal mandate on vaccines, which leaves it largely up to employers to exert pressure if they want their employees to avoid getting Covid-19. The news comes as the US government struggles to get its adult population vaccinated (currently fewer than half of eligible Americans have received one vaccine dose), and cases across the nation are rising as the more contagious delta variant spreads. Google was the first to announce this at the beginning of the day, and Facebook followed suit a few hours later.
Google and Facebook - two of the largest tech companies in the world - announced on Wednesday that they will be requiring that all employees returning to their US offices get vaccinated.
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