One of the great frustrations with Joe Biden’s vaccination mandate that has led to protests and lawsuits is the provision that puts private-sector workers out of their jobs if they remain unvaccinated. It’s already started happening in some places, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the news hasn’t been all bad for everyone. As most of you know by now, the United States has been caught up in a significant labor shortage this year as businesses around the nation have struggled to reopen. This has led some companies, including job recruiters to take note of a particular provision in the mandate and seek to take advantage of it. The mandate only applies to companies with at least 100 employees. With that in mind, smaller employers that are having trouble finding enough workers have begun actively recruiting the unvaccinated who are either out of work or may soon be because of the mandate. And it’s working. (NY Post)

Companies have turned to recruiting unvaccinated workers in the latest effort to combat the nationwide labor shortage that’s holding back companies from bouncing back from the depths of the pandemic.

JP Valadez, a worker at NextGen Code Company in Lubbock, Texas, launched NoVaxMandate.org, an online job board, to help connect the unvaccinated workforce to employers in need of more help, CNN Business reported.

Since the site’s August launch, it’s drawn more than 2.25 million unique visitors and over 20,000 resumes have been posted, Valadez told CNN. The site recently had roughly 500 active listings, the report said.

Those are some pretty remarkable figures. That single job board has posted tens of thousands of resumes of the unvaccinated and filled a great number of open positions. Others are using the same strategy and smaller individual companies are including those details in their help wanted ads. ‘No vax card? No problem! We are hiring right now!’

The organizer of the job board describes what they’re seeing as a “massive migration” of workers from larger corporations to small businesses. Ironically, one of the larger groups that have workers completely changing their professions is found in the healthcare industry. That’s because healthcare workers are among the first to have mandates imposed on them in every location. It’s sadly ironic that people who we rely most heavily on to protect us during the pandemic are the ones being forced out the door and into other lines of work.

One assisted living facility for seniors in Texas added the “no vaccination required” caveat to their online job listings in October, they almost immediately filled the job openings they had been struggling with for months. That was also a rather ironic juxtaposition when you think about Andrew Cuomo’s disastrous handling of the nursing home situation in New York.

This possibility is one that many foresaw and we had discussed here previously. When the President decided to issue that mandate and specified that it only applied to employers with at least 100 workers, it was obvious that the rules were not being applied evenly to everyone. If the vaccine mandate really offered such an excellent level of protection in the eyes of OSHA, then why was it not important to offer that same level of protection to the nation’s numerous small businesses? But it should have been equally as obvious that people who chose not to get the shots were still going to need to support themselves, so they would look for jobs with amenable smaller employers. Putting two and two together, it didn’t take long for both employers and unvaccinated workers to recognize the opportunity in front of them and for recruiters to begin matching people up.