Canadian employers, facing labor shortage, accommodate the unvaccinated

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government adopted one of the strictest vaccine policies in the world for civil servants and has already put more than 1,000 workers on unpaid leave, with thousands more at risk.Airlines, police forces, school boards and even Canada’s “I don’t know that I want to reduce the (labor) pool, which is already quite low,” said Eiser. “We need to attract people to meet the demand. If we don’t, our competitors will.”Data released on Friday underpinned Canada’s tight labor market, with a hefty “We are now starting to see our first workplace (Covid-19) cases in five months,” he said.The number of Canadian job postings on search website Indeed mentioning vaccine requirements has quadrupled since August.In the hard-hit manufacturing sector, where 77% of firms say their top concern is attracting and retaining workers, vaccine mandates are more rare.Dennis Darby, CEO of Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, said most of Canada’s factories have operated safely throughout the pandemic. While CME encourages vaccination, “some companies are still using rapid testing if somebody doesn’t want to get vaccinated,” he added.But companies risk a hit to their reputation if they are overt in efforts to tap into the unvaccinated as a labor pool, said Wojtek Dabrowski, managing partner at Provident Communications.”If you go out and say, ‘We are intentionally seeking to hire unvaccinated people,’ many customers are equating that with you being anti-science and anti-safety,” said Dabrowski.