Mobileye to ban employees not vaccinated for coronavirus
The company is assuming that about 10% of its workforce does not intend to vaccinate.
By ZEV STUBA general view of a Mobileye autonomous driving test vehicle, at the Mobileye headquarters in Jerusalem(photo credit: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun)
Mobileye employees who are not vaccinated will not be allowed to enter the company’s offices, president and CEO Amnon Shashua said Wednesday.“Proud that 90% of @Mobileye employees are fully or partly vaccinated already. We will ‘go green’ first week of April with only vaccinated employees coming in to the office & others continuing WFH. This is a promising start to a return to normalcy, I hope others will follow,” Shashua tweeted.According to a letter Shashua sent to workers, which was leaked to Channel 13, the company is assuming that about 10% of its workforce does not intend to receive the vaccination, based on an employee survey. Those workers will have to work from home – if their work allows it – when the company officially goes green on April 4, the letter said.If a worker who has not been vaccinated or who has recovered from the virus is needed to appear at the office, he will have to present a negative test carried out within the past 48 hours, the letter concluded. The maker of driver-assistance systems has about 1,500 employees at its Jerusalem offices in the Har Hotzvim technology park.Shashua’s statement was the first of its type from the head of a large Israeli company. Israel does not have a law allowing employers to require workers to get the vaccine, although Health Minister Yuli Edelstein has said he would promote such legislation.As the vaccination campaign advances, Israelis are starting to look forward to getting back to normalcy, and the return to the workplace will likely become a legal battleground. More than 4.5 million have already received the first shot, and 3.1 million are already fully vaccinated, according to Health Ministry figures.In a legal opinion presented last week in The Jerusalem Post, Orly Aviram and Nachum Feinberg, labor law experts and partners at the Feinberg & Co. law office, stressed that the issue of asking workers whether they have been vaccinated, or plan to be, is a complicated one.In general, requiring medical information from an employee may constitute an invasion of privacy and confidentiality in light of the Privacy Laws and Basic Law, although it can be permitted when the purpose is to prevent the risk of infecting others or make workforce decisions, the opinion concluded.
