San Francisco transport chiefs must pay nearly $8 million to six former staffers who were sacked after seeking religious exemptions to vaccine mandates amid the pandemic.
Jurors returned a verdict Wednesday that the Bay Area Rapid Transit District must pay more than $1 million in damages to each former employee, a total of nearly $7.8 million.
The sacked rail workers had said that their faith forbade them from getting vaccines.
Jurors in an earlier phase of the case rejected the managers’ main defense — that they couldn’t reasonably accommodate the workers seeking exemptions without undue hardship.
The case underscores how bosses sacrificed the rights of employees to choose whether to receive COVID shots, under the belief that it served a greater public good.
Under a 2021 mandate approved by the agency’s directors, all BART employees had to get vaccinated or faced the sack.
The workers sued the next year, backed by the Pacific Justice Institute, a conservative legal nonprofit.
San Francisco was the first major US city to require its employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The case is one of hundreds from workers around the country arguing their employers improperly denied their faith-based bids for exemption from vaccine mandates in the pandemic.
The workers’ attorney Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute said his clients ‘chose to lose their livelihood rather than deny their faith.’
That showed how seriously they felt against rolling up their sleeves for a shot.
‘After nearly three years of struggle, these essential workers feel they were heard and understood by the jury and are overjoyed and relieved by the verdict,’ Snider added.
The workers cited various beliefs to justify their exemption, including Catholicism and Islam.
‘My body is my temple,’ one plaintiff wrote.
Another said: ‘My Christian beliefs and faith do not allow me to have a biological substance in my body.’
Another worker claimed the vaccine was derived from cells taken from aborted fetuses.
Fetal cells have long been used to test and develop vaccines and other medicines, and the Vatican has approved the COVID-19 vaccine for Roman Catholics.
Still, the rail worker said: ‘I cannot use any product that takes its origin in abortion.’
BART declined to comment on the verdict from the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
The network has more than 3,000 employees and operates throughout the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area.
BART argued that its vaccine policy was a good-faith implementation of public health guidance at the time.
They said that accommodating unvaccinated workers would raise health risks for others and cause undue hardship on the agency.
BART and other transit agencies in the region struggled to vaccinate their workforces during the vaccine mandate rollout.
Hundreds of transit operators were not vaccinated and risked being fired under the strict policy.
The courts have been clogged with similar cases of employees being sacked for refusing to get jabbed during the pandemic.
Tanja Benton, 52, was awarded almost $700,000 in a landmark settlement in July, after being sacked BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BSBST) in November 2022 over their mandate.
The Navy and the Department of Defense in the same month settled a lawsuit over the former COVID-19 vaccine mandate with 36 service members, meaning their records were wiped clean.