Tears, hard talks with unvaccinated workers who want to stay

The hardest conversations with unvaccinated workers are with people afraid of getting the jab but who don’t want to leave their job, says Auckland Airport’s head of corporate services.

Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Michael Wood said on Tuesday that vaccinations would become mandatory for staff at businesses where vaccine passports were required for customers. Non-vaccinated workers in roles requiring vaccination will have four weeks to get vaccinated before their employment can be terminated.

Many airport workers were covered by the mandatory vaccination order for border workers. Now everyone was required to be vaccinated on the worksite, Auckland Airport head of corporate services Mary-Liz Tuck said.

‘‘You will have some people who won’t get vaccinated and that is just life, and they have various reasons as to why they won’t get vaccinated,’’ she told an Employers and Manufacturers Association webinar yesterday.

‘‘So some of those conversations were quite tough and there were tears, and we had people who genuinely thought that when the needle went in the arm that they were going to have a very adverse reaction.’’

Ultimately, it was an employee’s decision whether to get vaccinated or not, she said. ‘‘Some people are anti-vax and just want to leave, so they will leave . . . They just resign, they take their payment and go. But there are some people who want to stay who just are genuinely petrified, so those are very tough conversations to have.’’

Tuck said the airport had been dealing with Covid-19 right from the start, with the arrival of the repatriation flight from the Chinese city of Wuhan on February 5, 2020.

The Covid-19 vaccine became available to staff in February 2021. The spread of the Delta variant prompted the airport to beat by a month the Government’s September 30 requirement for frontline workers to be vaccinated.

‘‘. . . there are some people who want to stay who just are genuinely petrified, so those are very tough conversations.’’

Mary-Liz Tuck Auckland Airport