A half-dozen holdout BART employees who refused to get the COVID-19 vaccine, and lost their jobs because of it, just won a $7.8 million in federal court on the claim that BART did not honor their religious exemptions.
We mentioned earlier this week that six BART employees who were fired for refusing to get the COVID-19 vaccine sued the transit agency in federal court claiming that BART refused to honor their religious exemptions. BART, of course, required all employees to be vaccinated in an October 2021 order, at a time when the Bay Area was seeing 5,000 new cases of COVID-19 every week.
But the Chronicle reports that a federal jury sided with the vaccine refusers who were fired, and awarded them $7.8 million. The jury ruled that BART failed to show how accommodating these employees’ so-called religious exemptions created an “undue hardship” on the agency.
The money is not being split evenly among the employees. According to SFGate, each of the six plaintiffs will receive between $1.2 million and $1.5 million apiece.
The six employees were represented by a right-wing legal outfit called the Pacific Justice Institute. “The choice between their religious convictions and the loss of their livelihood caused an upheaval in these rail workers' lives,” Pacific Justice Institute chief counsel Kevin Snider said in a statement picked up by the Chronicle. “For these employees it was important that a jury heard and understood them.”
For their part, BART had “no comment” on the ruling.
For local marijuana fans, the name Pacific Justice Institute might ring a bell. This is also the organization that led the 2017 charge to deny an Outer Sunset cannabis dispensary that would have been co-owned former Oakland mayor Jean Quan. That organization also sued the City of San Francisco in 2016 for putting a pissoir in Dolores Park.
There were other BART employees who were fired but did not participate in this lawsuit, as Bloomberg reported in July of this year that 16 ex-BART employees managed to get financial settlements. The size of those settlements was not reported at the time.
Image: Pi.1415926535 via Wikimedia Commons
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