Back in October, Ford Canada announced that it would be mandating COVID-19 vaccines for all of its employees by the end of the year. However, Ford Canada later revealed that employees had to be vaccinated by January 3rd, but did not say how it would handle workers who refused the vaccine. Now that the new year has come, Ford has decided to extend its vaccine deadline for its Canadian employees, according to Automotive News.
Ford of Canada has extended its vaccine mandate deadline to March 28th, though it reports that most of its workers have already been vaccinated. “We have been very encouraged by the support of our employees to comply with our protocols, including the approximately 90 percent of our hourly and salaried workforce who are fully vaccinated,” Ford spokesperson Kerri Stoakley told Automotive News in an email.
Stoakley did not provide a reason for why Ford decided to extend this deadline but said that the automaker would continue to encourage those who are not currently vaccinated to do so in the coming months. Additionally, Canadian union Unifor has been fighting the terms of the mandate and said that employees who do not wish to get vaccinated can submit a request for accommodation for religious or medical reasons.
In the U.S., Ford asked its U.S.-based workers to submit their COVID-19 vaccination status last year. As Ford Authority was the first to report, all of Ford’s U.S.-based salaried workers were required to get the COVID-19 vaccine by December 8th or possibly receive 30 days of unpaid leave with job protection followed by termination, though FoMoCo will not impose a similar vaccine mandate for its UAW workers. In late November the automaker announced that its salaried employee vaccine mandate deadline had been pushed back to the first week of January.
We’ll have more on Ford’s vaccine mandates soon, so be sure to subscribe to Ford Authority for the latest Ford-related COVID-19 news and 24/7 Ford news coverage.
