South Carolina Anti-Vaccine Mandate Law: Implications for Private Employers

South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster has signed into legislation Home Invoice 3126, which has implications for private and non-private employers that proceed to require workers in South Carolina to be vaccinated in opposition to COVID-19.

The legislation prohibits public employers within the State of South Carolina from requiring that people be vaccinated as a situation of employment. Equally, colleges throughout the state can not require attendees to be vaccinated. Personal employers within the state can mandate vaccination, however they need to broadly permit for non secular and medical exemptions (defined under).

The legislation prohibits locations of public lodging (resembling eating places, inns, theaters, and live performance halls) from requiring that patrons be vaccinated or present proof of vaccination for entry.

Federal contractors are exempt from the necessities of the legislation.

The legislation additionally symbolically declares any federal vaccination mandate unconstitutional and unenforceable within the State of South Carolina.

Exemptions

Personal employers that implement a vaccine mandate are required below the legislation to acknowledge non secular and medical exemptions.

To assert a non secular exemption, a person want solely “present his [or her] employer with a brief, plain assertion” indicating the vaccination requirement violates a tenet of their deeply held non secular conviction.

Medical exemptions can embrace the presence of antibodies, an earlier constructive COVID-19 check consequence, or being pregnant. The legislation is silent on how lengthy prior constructive check outcomes or antibodies exams can exempt workers from an employer’s vaccine requirement.

Impartial contractors, nonemployee distributors, and different third events merely offering employers with items and providers should be excluded from an employer’s vaccine mandate. The legislation additionally permits personal employers to supply incentives to workers who elect to be vaccinated.

Unemployment Advantages

The legislation supplies that workers who’re terminated or suspended or who are suffering a pay discount for failing to adjust to an employer’s vaccination requirement are eligible for unemployment advantages.

COVID-19 Legal responsibility Immunity Act

The brand new legislation reenacts an earlier piece of laws, the South Carolina COVID-19 Legal responsibility Immunity Act, handed in Could 2021. The Act supplies employers immunity from lawsuits claiming that their workers or patrons contracted COVID-19 within the office, so long as the employer is taking affordable steps to comply with public well being steerage on the time.

Initially, the Act utilized retroactively to claims filed between March 13, 2020, and June 30, 2021. The brand new legislation expands that interval to December 31, 2023. (For extra particulars on the COVID-19 Legal responsibility Immunity Act, see our articles, South Carolina Governor Indicators COVID-19 Legal responsibility Immunity Act Into Regulation and South Carolina Senate Passes COVID-19 Legal responsibility Immunity Act.)