A group of American Airlines workers are asking a judge to blunt the reach of the airline’s COVID vaccine mandate, saying in a recently filed lawsuit that the vaccine mandate, alone, does little to actually stop the spread of COVID and make the airlines’ operations any safer.
Late last year, American Airlines employees Clarence J. Stephens, Nancy M. Stephens, Donna Guzzio and Andrea Stahl filed suit in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago against their employer. They are represented in the action by attorney Ilia Usharovich, of Wheeling.
American Airlines responded to that filing on Dec. 31, seeking to remove the case to federal district court in Chicago.
Ilia Usharovich
| Law Offices of Ilia Usharovich
The complaint takes aim at American Airlines’ decision to implement a mandate last fall, requiring its workers to either receive a full dose of a COVID vaccine, or risk disciplinary action, including potential termination.
However, the complaint asserts this mandate violates the terms of the employees’ contract.
Specifically, the complaint notes the contract requires the airline and its employees to work together to “promote safe and sanitary conditions in all facilities.”
However, the employees’ complaint notes American Airlines’ vaccine mandate falls short of that goal, because it doesn’t simultaneously include any requirement for workers to be tested to see if they may be contagious with an active infection of the virus the company has stated the vaccine mandate is intended to prevent.
The vaccine mandate is “a breach of the contract in that it does not promote safe and sanitary conditions in all facilities since it does not constantly test vaccinated persons, exempted, and unvaccinated persons, all of whom can be infected with ‘break through infection’ or unvaccinated infection and then transfer such infections to customers, employees, and other airport security personal (sic),” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “As a result, it makes the facilities and operations of the company unsafe.”
“… The mandate of a vaccine with side effects also not promote the safe and sanitary conditions,” the complaint said.
The workers claim the grievance process spelled out in their collective bargaining agreement also are insufficient, under the current circumstances, because workers, in the meantime, may suffer “irreparable injury,” including illness and death, “due to lengthy administrative procedures that fail to provide interim relief and the dangers posed every day testing is not made.”
The complaint asks the court to order American Airlines to “withdraw” the vaccine mandate and “conduct reasonable testing.”
American Airlines has not yet responded directly to the plaintiffs’ breach of contract claims.
In removing the case to federal court, American Airlines asserts the case belongs in federal, rather than state court, in part, because the workers’ assertion of claims under their collective bargaining agreement are governed by the federal Railway Labor Act.
American Airlines is represented in the case by attorneys Paul E. Bateman and Lavanga V. Wijekoon, of Littler Mendelson P.C., of Chicago, and Mark W. Robertson and Charles J. Mahoney, of the firm of O’Melveny & Myers, of New York.