Washington — United Airlines said on Wednesday that it is terminating the contract of 232 employees, who have decided against taking the Covid-19 vaccine.
United Airlines was the first major carrier to make it mandatory for employees to get vaccinated, after US President Joe Biden's executive order for federal contractors to get fully vaccinated.
Commenting on the decision to terminate jobs, United Airlines CEO Steve Kirby said, "I wish we would have gotten to 100 [per cent] but out of our 67,000 US employees, there are 232 who haven't been vaccinated and they are going through the termination process now."
The CEO said that the decision to remove the employees from their jobs came after hearing about the loss of a United pilot in July, after Kirby spent most part of the pandemic writing letters to the family members of United employees who lost to the virus.
At present out of the airlines' 67,000 employees, 99.7 per cent are completely vaccinated.
After United Airlines took the decision to fully vaccinate its staff, other airlines like Hawaiian Airlines and Frontier Airlines also did so. While United has decided to be strict with its employees regarding the vaccine, there are many airlines which are making it voluntary on the part of the employees.
The Biden government's vaccine mandate for federal contractors has made it very difficult for airlines to follow and they are forced to take drastic steps like terminating employment to get them to comply. At present, Delta Airlines remains the largest American airlines without a full vaccine mandate and achieved a 90 per cent vaccination rate on Wednesday.
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