About 1 in 5 workers would quit jobs if masks or COVID vaccines mandated, poll finds

In the wake of multiple companies mandating vaccines for their employees, around 1 in 5 employees said in a new poll that they would quit their job if they are required to comply with vaccine or mask requirements.

A Morning Consult survey — conducted June 23-27 with a sample of 1,119 employed adults — found that 18% of workers said they’d “quit immediately” if faced with pandemic-related mandates, including masking, vaccines or COVID testing.

Google, Facebook and the Washington Post announced last week that they were requiring their U.S. workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19. President Joe Biden announced that federal workers would be required to attest that they’re inoculated against the coronavirus or follow rules on masking, social distancing and weekly testing, according to the Associated Press.

The responses to COVID-19 mandates were partisan. Among those who opposed mandates, 18% are Democrats, 47% are Republican and and 34% are independent.

Employees who didn’t get a college education were also more likely to be against mandates. Seventy-six percent of opponents aren’t college educated, 16% have a bachelor’s degree and 8% have a post-graduate degree.

Comparatively , only about 3% of all respondents said they’d quit their jobs if their companies didn’t require their unvaccinated workers to follow masking rules.

More than 191 million people in the U.S. have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine, accounting for 57.8% of the population, as of Aug. 2, according to the CDC. At least 164.9 million eligible people are fully vaccinated.

Renewed mask mandates and companies requiring workers to be vaccinated come as COVID-19 cases continue to spike across the country, fueled by vaccine hesitancy and the delta variant, which was first discovered in India and in now the dominant strain spreading in the U.S.

“You take a reputational risk upfront, but you may be saving yourself from an outbreak of the infection later,” said Anna Tavis, academic director of the Human Capital Management program at the New York University School of Professional Studies Division of Programs in Business, according to Morning Consult. “Employers are going to be weighing the risks of losing a certain percentage of their employees, but at the same time, protecting the rest.”

COVID-19 cases across the U.S. have risen by 149% in the past two weeks and hospitalizations have increased by 86% over that same time period as of Aug. 2, according to The New York Times.

San Francisco and six other Bay Area counties reinstated a mask mandate Monday for everyone in indoor settings regardless of vaccination status, ABC reported, following other localized mandates across the country in recent days.

The U.S. has had more than 35 million coronavirus cases and 613,600 deaths since the start of the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University data as of Aug. 2.