Ingalls workers protest mandatory vaccines at Coast rally. ‘Freedom is sacred down here.’
When the Ingalls Shipbuilding whistle blew at 2:30 p.m. Friday, indicating a shift change, a number of employees didn’t get in their cars or wait in line for buses ready to transport them home to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or the Florida panhandle.
Instead, they went to U.S. 90 in Pascagoula, gathered homemade signs and flags, and faced the freeway in protest of a recently-confirmed vaccine mandate for federal workers near the entrance of one of the country’s largest federal contractors.
Some hesitant to take a vaccine because of the drug itself and most angry at the mandate’s infringement on their freedoms, event organizer and Ingalls engineer Nolan Mann estimated around 1,000 to 1,500 workers and their family members from across the Gulf Coast rallied from noon to 6 p.m. in the nation’s least vaccinated region.
“What they (the government) don’t want is people to open their mouths, but they’re in the South,” said Annie Taylor, a Mobile, Alabama, resident who has a family member working in the shipyard. “And I’ve got a big mouth.”
Trucks and cars honked as they whirled by, the rally swelling over the course of the day. The protest was tame, with hot dogs and sausages grilling underneath an overlook and an ice cream truck and snow cone truck to feed small children.
“We’re very ‘free the people,’ redneck stuff,” she laughed, “And I can say that because I’m from the South. Freedom is sacred down here. We value our freedom and flag. This should be a choice. It’s not fair.”
Ingalls Shipbuilding, John C. Stennis Space Center and other federal jobs on the Coast now require all employees be vaccinated by Dec. 8, 2021, following updated guidance handed down by the Biden administration in late September. The decision garnered significant pushback before its confirmation and now could cause a mass exodus from Coast federal jobs.
“We have family members, friends that are employees of not just Ingalls but other places that are mandating, and everyone that I know is not going to comply and we are here as a voice for them because they don’t want to lose their jobs,” said Ocean Springs resident Brittany Schmidt, a rally attendee.
The issue extends from the unvaccinated to vaccinated members of the Coast ready to sacrifice their livelihood for “freedom,” said Schmidt’s friend Ashley Novak-Johnson, a Biloxi resident with five children ages 15, 9, 8, 6 and 2.
“I already have a coworker who has been fired. And I work with a few people who have been vaccinated who said they will stand up against this as well if it’s going to be enforced upon anybody. They’re refusing to show their vaccination cards,” she said.
“I would lose my job to put a roof over my kids’ heads because I’m not going to put this in my body … That’s where we pray to God and know that he’s going to support us. I told them we need to keep praying and God’s going to make a way for us because mommy and daddy might not have jobs and things are going to change. Don’t be asking to go get McDonald’s.”
Much of the planning for the rally occurred in a private Facebook group named Gulf Coast Against Mandates, which touts over 7,000 members, many of which are Ingalls employees. But Mann, along with another organizer and Ingalls engineer Joseph Triplett, repeated that the event was held for all workers who fear government oversight, not against one particular employer.
“We are the back bone of the economy, we are the once praised essential workers. We are the now shamed, the threatened, and the disobedient. We are shunned for our cautious distrust,” the Facebook event description reads.
“This is the day we make our voice heard. This is the day we make our presence felt. We are not just numbers on a spread sheet ... We can make a difference if we become united, we need people from all walks of life, from all political backgrounds, from all vaccine statuses.”
On the Coast, where vaccination rates lag behind state averages and are well below national rates, Ingalls has struggled to vaccinate its workforce. In late September, a spokesperson for the company, which builds 70% of the U.S. Navy fleet of warships at its 800-acre facility in Pascagoula, told the Sun Herald that under 50% of its 11,500 employees has been vaccinated against COVID.
Ingalls joins other Navy shipbuilders in having a difficult time vaccinating its workforce, including their parent company Huntington Ingalls Industries’ other shipbuilder, Newport News in Virginia, whose workers rallied a week ago.
“Only about half of the workers at two of the Navy’s shipbuilders are vaccinated against COVID-19, top executives from the two companies said,” according to a press release from a September 23, 2021, press report delivered to the Congressional Research Service.
“The sobering numbers, which were revealed during Defense One’s State of the Navy event Thursday morning, offer a snapshot of defense contractors’ struggle to get workers vaccinated.”
How does leadership view the rally?
Before the rally, an Ingalls spokesperson relayed a statement to the Sun Herald regarding the upcoming event:
“Yes, Ingalls is aware of the event and recognizes employees’ rights to express their views … employees are part of the community so we can’t take away their freedoms.”
Unions were a notable group missing from supporting the rally.
“The union doesn’t have a dog in the fight,” said Tommy Bates, an Ingalls machinist who is chief union steward of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace, Local 1133.
“I cannot support them, if they go out of the yard, that’s on them. No one in the union has the authority to remove a federal mandate. We cannot support them if they walk out.”
The majority of attendees were able to come to the protest without a problem, according to Mann and Triplett.
“Nobody is being fired for doing this,” Triplett said. “As long as you can do all of this within the company’s guidelines. I’ve been talking about it at work and they’re not mad at me for it. It’s not hush-hush.”
The rally received little support from elected officials. Republican State Sen. Chris McDaniel of Ellisville backed the organizers and is headed to the Pascagoula Hilton Garden Inn on Thursday for an event to further embrace the workers.
The rally organizers also had the support of Dr. John Witcher, a doctor who the Mississippi Board of Medical Licensure once called a “danger to the public” but has recently gotten his physician’s license reinstated.
The Yazoo City emergency-room physician heads Mississippi Against Mandates, a group of physicians retaliating against hospitals requiring employees to be vaccinated, and was in his white coat at the side of U.S. 90 on Friday.
Pascagoula Police Chief Matt Chapman said the rally organizers communicated with their special operations department early in the event planning process for organizational help.
“We’ve been in contact with the folks organizing, we’re going to assist them in any way we can,” said Chapman. “It’s not against the law to protest. We are glad they are reaching out to us so that we can coordinate with them to have a safe place to do it.”
What are workers fighting for?
Rally attendees expressed concern about the safety and duration of testing for the vaccine, along with religious concerns.
“We live in the bible belt. A lot of it is religion. And all three of the COVID vaccines are made using or have been used in the development process, aborted fetal cells. You just can’t do that and expect to mandate that on the people here,” said Schmidt.
But no issue was more important than freedom at the anti-mandate rally.
“If they make these guys do this, if you don’t get vaccinated, are you going to lose your Social Security? Your Medicare? What’s next?” said Perkinston resident Thomas Porter, 62, who retired from Ingalls in 2019 after 42 years.
“I’m worried about government overreach, period. That sums it all up. It’s my constitutional right, it’s my body, my choice. For years they’re yelling, my body my choice! Abortion!”
Porter doesn’t support abortion, however.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought this could happen in the United States, where we have a constitution.”
A reasonable expectation from the rally would be for the government to see their objection and rescind the mandate, Mann said. If not, he, Triplett and a number of others said they would find work in the private sector.
Ryan Anderson, an Ingalls electrician who attended the rally with his father Gary, also said he’d switch from the private sector. He’d work in his dad’s business, Sun Coast Auto Sales in Ocean Springs, if the mandate is enforced.
“I absolutely quit and would work for my dad. It’s entrepreneurship at its finest.”
Is a vaccine mandate constitutional?
A rising concern for the rally attendees is the constitutionality of a mandate, an abstract question not yet discussed in a Mississippi courtroom.
GOP Coast Senator Jeremy England said that while he’s opposed to a vaccine mandate, he’s not sure that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to refuse to enter into contracts with vendors and manufacturers unless the employees are vaccinated.
“I don’t support the mandate from the Biden administration but that said, you know we have to keep in mind that these are employees that are working on federally contracted jobs and so that is where I think the issue becomes a little more tricky,” England said in an interview with the Sun Herald.
The senator said that Ingalls is in a difficult position because, if they were to breach federal regulations, they could run the risk of not being awarded new contracts, impacting work opportunities in the area.
“If we were to pass a law that said that Ingalls or that any employer cannot mandate vaccinations, then the federal government could say, ‘OK, well, we’re just gonna take our contracts elsewhere,’” England said.
“And then that costs people their jobs and I do not want to ever cast a vote that is going to potentially cost somebody their job. I do not want to cost them their freedom, either. So that’s where this issue gets into really tricky territory.”
This article and live event is supported by the Journalism and Public Information Fund, a fund of the Gulf Coast Community Foundation.
This story was originally published October 9, 2021 at 10:45 AM.
