San Francisco BART to Pay $7 Million in Worker Vaccine Case (1)

October 29, 2024 in News by RBN Staff

source:  bloomberglaw

Oct. 23, 2024, 6:48 PM CDT; Updated: Oct. 24, 2024, 6:00 AM CDT

Isaiah Poritz
Legal Reporter

The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District must pay around $7.8 million to six former employees who lost their jobs after seeking religious exemptions to the agency’s Covid-19 vaccine mandate for workers.

A jury for the US District Court for the Northern District of California returned the verdict on Wednesday, which specified over $1 million in damages for each former employee.

The jury in an earlier phase of the trial had rejected BART’s primary defense that the public transit agency couldn’t reasonably accommodate the employees seeking religious exemptions without an undue hardship.

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 implemented in the midst of the pandemic.

The workers’ attorney Kevin Snider of the Pacific Justice Institute said in a statement that “the rail employees chose to lose their livelihood rather than deny their faith,” which shows the sincerity of their convictions.

“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,” he said.

BART declined to comment on the verdict. The agency filed a motion for judgment as a matter of law during the trial, which Judge William Alsup said would be argued in December.

BART, which has over 3,000 employees and operates throughout the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area, was sued by the former employees in 2022.

The workers claimed that BART failed to accommodate their requests for religious exemption from the vaccine requirement that was imposed by the transit agency’s board of directors in fall 2021, costing them their jobs. The workers cited a variety of beliefs to justify their exemption, including Catholicism and Islam.

BART argued that its vaccine policy was a good-faith implementation of public health guidance at the time, and that accommodating unvaccinated works would pose an increased health risk and an undue hardship on the agency.

Alsup earlier this year declined to certify the case as a class action, instead requiring each worker to show how BART violated their religious rights.

He declared a partial mistrial in July, when a previous jury was deadlocked on the questions of whether BART would face an undue hardship by accommodating the unvaccinated employees.

The Pacific Justice Institute represents the former employees. Glynn Finley Mortl Hanlon & Friedenberg LLP represents BART.

The case is Lewis-Williams v. San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District, N.D. Cal., No. 3:22-cv-06119, 10/23/24.

(Updates Oct. 23 story to add plaintiffs’ statement in paragraphs fifth and sixth.)


To contact the reporter on this story: Isaiah Poritz in San Francisco at iporitz@bloombergindustry.com

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Amy Lee Rosen at arosen@bloombergindustry.com; Carmen Castro-Pagán at ccastro-pagan@bloomberglaw.com