Adventures in corporate COVID policy

A friend of a friend works for a very well known investment services firm, that sells mutual funds, financial planning, and portfolio management to clients. She’s essentially in a sales support position. She’s in meetings and online all day, spending lots of time on the phone talking to various financial advisors an sometimes their clients. None of what she does really requires her to be in person. It’s the sort of job she says could be done from home 95% of the time.

So earlier this summer the firm asked all of their people to provide proof of vaccination, as they started to discuss a return to the office and what the future would look like. This included various promises that people would be able to blend office time with remote work opportunities. This was before delta. Most people, her included, sent in their proof of vaccination.

About two weeks later, the firm sent out a memo that they expected all of their vaccinated employees to return to the office for every business day in August. As fo unvaccinated employees, they could continue to work from home.

Naturally she’s furious. She’s been working back in the office even before her kids went back to school, while anti-vax coworkers get to work from home. No flex home/office schedule has been announced. She knows people who were just procrastinators, who never sent in proof of vaccination, and who were bragging about getting vaccinated this spring, who now aren’t sending their vaccination info in on purpose, in order to continue working from home.

So far this firm has made no mention of making the vaccine mandatory or firing those who don’t get it. So she’s being punished both for being vaccinated, and for being honest about it.

I don’t know the name of the firm, but I’m told that Bank of America has instituted the same policy.

Somebody got paid a lot of money to come up with this.