Unvaccinated Ingalls workers locked in a complicated battle for religious exemptions

Mac Canterbury of Gautier trudged back to his car outside Ingalls Shipbuilding’s on-site vaccination tent last Wednesday, his head low.

Moments before, the shipfitter had received his first Pfizer shot, on the last possible day he could in order to get the second shot by the then Dec. 8 deadline. Last Thursday, the deadline for federal contractors to be fully vaccinated or face termination was pushed back to Jan. 4.

A devout Christian, Canterbury said he felt “defeated” getting his vaccine, which he believes poses a conflict to his faith.

But after filing a religious exemption request with the federal contractor in early October, the company’s recent rejection of his appeal to avoid vaccination led him to begrudgingly comply with the federal mandate for their contractors. Canterbury really needs the job, he said, because he has to provide for his wife and son.

“I’m ticked off about it. The Lord tells us not to put anything bad inside our bodies, and I believe this is bad,” he said. “My religious exemption was turned down about a week ago.”

Canterbury is one of a number of Ingalls employees who had their religious exemption requests denied, now making eleventh-hour vaccination decisions as the deadline for mandatory shots looms at the shipbuilding company, one of the country’s largest federal contractors.

At the same time, across the street from the vaccination tent last Wednesday, a group of other Ingalls workers with denied exemption forms chose a riskier path.

Unvaccinated and facing imminent termination, they stood on the U.S. 90 median in Pascagoula just outside the shipyard, protesting shots and handing out U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint forms to anyone else who still refuses to get their shots after failed exemption attempts.

With guidance from the anti-vaccine group Mississippi Against Mandates, anti-mandate champion State Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville, a few Ingalls engineers and local lawyers, these workers are beginning to coordinate legal disputes to their denied religious exemptions against the company on the basis of discrimination.

It’s unclear how many religious exemption requests the company approved or denied, but Nolan Mann, who runs the popular Facebook group, Gulf Coast Against Mandates, estimates hundreds were disproved by Ingalls’ human resources department. He’s received messages and feedback that most got theirs rejected near the end of October, about a week after the company-set deadline for exemptions of Oct. 21.

“Ingalls seems to be taking a pretty heavy-handed approach right now,” said McDaniel, who has heard from a number of Ingalls employees who have had their religious exemption forms denied.

“Now that’s from a very small sample size … but what we’re hearing is that many who have requested religious exemptions have been denied due to the undue hardship.”

Ingalls declined to comment to the Sun Herald on the number of religious exemptions forms they’d approved or denied.

“Ingalls received several hundred requests for exemptions from the Federal vaccine mandate based on religious beliefs. In responding to these requests, Ingalls acknowledged the sincerity of these religious beliefs in all but two cases (which were not fundamentally about religious beliefs.) However, it was determined that an accommodation was not available to these employees because of the resulting undue hardship on the company, based on employee safety and other factors,” said Ingalls spokesperson Danny Hernandez.

Huntington Ingalls President and CEO Mike Petters wrote to staff in a memo last week to the 80% of Ingalls employees who are already fully or partially vaccinated against COVID that “If you have not received a medical or religious exemption and are not yet vaccinated, please do not delay.”

Ingalls, a leading producer of ships for the United States Navy, would lose about 20% of its Pascagoula workforce if the deadline to be fully vaccinated was today.

The company has 11,500 employees and is the largest manufacturing employer in Mississippi, according to its website.

Why cite religious exemptions?

Ingalls employees have long resisted federal calls for mandatory vaccines.

In October, McDaniels warned a crowd of workers opposed to the vaccine that religious exemptions might be the surest way to ward off impending mandates, as a legislative or legal halt to the requirement might be a slower or losing strategy.

“The religious aspect of this is going to be a very powerful instrument for you … a deeply held religious belief is protected in our laws. My body is my temple. My immune system is part of my temple. I have faith in God to be a healer. I don’t want to put my faith in men,” McDaniel said at the rally.

Workers attempted to file these exemptions soon after. Some, like Canterbury, claimed the vaccine conflicted with their body’s ability to defend itself with its immune system. Some claimed the widely circulated rumors that aborted fetal cells are in the shots or tested with them.

Ingalls employee Justin Bryant said when he went into the company’s HR department to drop his own exemption off, “hundreds” of his peers’ forms were piled for submission.

Later that week, Bryant said he and many others started receiving denials from the company of their requests.

“I wrote that my sincerely held belief was that God created me in his image. And that included an immune system. And I don’t want to alter that in any way, shape or form,” said Daniel Steiner, who has worked at Ingalls for nine months. His appeal was denied Oct. 26.

“My form was absolutely denied.”

How Ingalls evaluated the requests

Ingalls said in a statement to the Sun Herald that it evaluated and responded to each request individually.

“Each exemption was individually reviewed and assessed in accordance with the applicable legal standards,” said Hernandez. “We respect the privacy and choice of our workforce and we are not discussing their requests publicly.”

Jackson-based employment attorney Nick Norris said religious exemption requests are generally evaluated under certain civil rights laws but are also up to specific companies depending on the nature of their work and what they’re able to accommodate.

“It’s a situation that employers are trying to handle the best they can, but there’s not always a bright-line rule on accommodations. What they look at really is whether it’s a hardship on the employer, to provide that accommodation,” Norris said.

In a religious exemption denial sent to one employee by the company’s EEO & Diversity Office and obtained by the Sun Herald, Ingalls highlighted its inability to accommodate the worker’s request.

“Ingalls has also reviewed various potential accommodations and determined that any such accommodations constitute an undue hardship (i.e. more than ‘de minimis’ burden on Ingalls) based on the risks of remaining unvaccinated.”

An employee’s refusal to comply with an employer’s policy on vaccination is generally not protected under federal law. The law requires reasonable accommodation of employees’ religious beliefs unless doing so would cause more than a minimal burden on the operations of the employer’s business.

The problem with working at a shipyard, Norris said, was that accommodations are challenging because of the nature of the work.

Next step: a discrimination claim

Despite the federal courts last week approving a temporary pause on vaccine mandates for large businesses, and lawsuits filed by Mississippi for mandates on federal contractors, McDaniel and others guiding workers on the issue have encouraged Ingalls employees who had their religious exemptions denied to still move forward with legal action claiming discrimination.

To do so, the first step is filing the EEOC charge of discrimination form within 180 days of receiving a denied exemption. Then, the EEOC will either set an employee up for potential mediation or for an investigation.

The agency will then issue an opinion on whether they support the cause or do not find enough evidence to support a claim. A worker would then have the right to sue within 90 days.

“The whole process at the EEOC usually takes about six months,” Norris said. That buys unvaccinated workers no time ahead of the Jan. 4 federal deadline.

Alex Brady, a Long Beach-based trial attorney, said a temporary injunction, or a court order stopping employee termination until there has been a trial or other court action, could be one of the only legal solutions for the workforce at this point because decisions by the EEOC wouldn’t be decided before employee termination.

Brady, who has practiced law on the Mississippi Coast for 21 years, has volunteered to help the workforce file for these injunctions. He said he’s working with a number of Ingalls employees currently.

McDaniel said he is hoping a federal lawsuit will permanently be approved through the courts before the Jan. 4 deadline so that the precedent for all vaccine mandates would be set and individuals wouldn’t have to continue their lawsuits.

“A victory there secures victory for everybody at once,” said McDaniel.

Are workers likely to win the battle?

The Biden administration says it is confident that its requirement will withstand legal challenges, in part because its safety rules pre-empt state laws, the Associated Press reported. Norris agreed that the workers’ lawsuits may fall short.

Besides federal litigation, Ingalls employees are seeing little success on the issue other than having support from Sen. McDaniel and some advocacy groups.

The unions representing Ingalls workers aren’t poised to step into this fight, said Tommy Bates, an Ingalls machinist who is chief union steward of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace, Local 1133. Bates said he also does not know how many religious exemptions were filed by his members.

“Of course, they ask what is the union going to do?” he said. “The union has no authority over federal mandates. Not anything right now that can be done.”

Mann, and a few other anti-mandate rally organizers, said that Ingalls has been “pretty much silent” on the issue, other than basic emails and reminders about vaccination dates, despite their requests for more information.

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 November 15, 2021 at 5:00 AM.

Isabella Murray

Sun Herald

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