This Wednesday, the cabinet should once again bend over an amendment to the “Sars-CoV-2 Occupational Safety and Health Ordinance” – the set of rules with which Federal Labor Minister Hubertus Heil (SPD) has already given companies in the pandemic the obligation to test, the supply their employees with medical masks or, in the meantime, the obligation to offer home offices.
The focus is now on vaccination during working hours. Because in the ministerial draft that the Süddeutsche Zeitung is available, it says: “The employer must enable employees to be vaccinated against the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus during working hours.” The move fits in with the government’s strategy of making vaccination as low-threshold as possible – in order to at least convince those who have so far said “no” out of comfort rather than out of vaccination skepticism.
From the employer’s point of view, however, another point is apparently more explosive. Employers heard on Monday that on the one hand they disliked the “mandatory test offer” in companies – especially against the background that the so-called citizen tests will soon be chargeable, while at the same time the 3G rule for many areas of the public Life means stricter test obligations for all unvaccinated people. The concern of employers: a run on the tests in the companies that are still free for employees in order to avoid the fees in the test centers.
On the other hand, there is resentment with regard to the regulations for vaccinated and convalescent people. According to the amendment to the ordinance, an employer can “take into account a known vaccination or recovery status of the employees” in its infection protection measures. But the question is: How does he find out who has been vaccinated and who has recovered? For reasons of data protection, he is generally not allowed to simply ask: “The employer’s right to information about the vaccination or recovery status of the employees does not result from this provision,” says the explanatory part of the draft.
It was said from employers’ circles that clarification was expected from the government; the regulation creates “confusion”. In fact, the draft states that the company hygiene concepts could be adapted on the basis of the “voluntary information provided by the employees”. However, if the employer has no knowledge of the vaccination or recovery status of his people, he must assume, according to the ordinance, that this status does not exist either – without being allowed to ask. The newly created possibility of adapting hygiene rules would thus remain a theoretical one.