A few holdout BART employees who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and lost their jobs because of it, have taken their case to a federal court, claiming BART did not honor their religious exemptions.

Remember back in the dark days of COVID-19, when the vaccines first became available, and tons of city employees tried to hold out and refused to get vaccinated? As we noted around that time, BART also gave their employees a vaccine mandate. Many refused, so BART did not fuck around, and fired a number of them.  

But that’s not the end of the story. Some of those ex-employees claimed their religious exemptions were not honored. Many brought a class-action suit against BART, which was not successful. A reported 16 ex-BART employees managed to get settlements out of BART, though the size of those settlements has not been reported. And seven of those former BART employees who refused to get vaccinated insisted on proceeding to a jury trial against the transit agency.

The number has somehow whittled itself down to six former BART employees, and KGO reports those ex-employees currently have their case before a federal jury. The gist of the plaintiffs’ arguments is that BART should have honored their so-called religious exemptions, allowing them the “reasonable accommodations” to either work from home or get COVID tests regularly, but did not.

The first half of the trial is actually already over, the jurors have ruled that BART did not provide reasonable accommodations to these employees before firing them. But the jury will still decide whether these six employees had valid religious exemptions, or whether they were just making up excuses. So it seems theoretically possible that the jury might side with some of these plaintiffs, but not with others.

According to KGO, a verdict could come in as early as this week. That outlet points to one example of a Tennessee plaintiff who was awarded $600,000 after refusing to get vaccinated, getting fired, and suing their employer over the firing.

Related: BART Joins Other Transit Agencies In Requiring Employees to Be Vaccinated [SFist]

Image: Exterior of a BART train stopped at the station, with SFO Airport destination sign visible, San Francisco, California, June 7, 2024. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)