The COVID-19 pandemic has brought up seemingly endless unique legal challenges for businesses and employers for the past 18 months, and counting. Beginning with lockdown and restrictions, remote working, paycuts, retrenchments and reorganisations, businesses in Malaysia and many other jurisdictions are now focusing on reopening, and hopefully moving into a post-pandemic future.
In recent weeks, we have been reading about the issue of mandating vaccines for employees. The legality of so-called “no jab no job” policies continues to be debated in major jurisdictions such as the UK, US, and Europe, where the reopening of the economy is at a more advanced stage than Malaysia, and where many companies have been implementing mandatory vaccination policies. Multinational companies with a Malaysian presence are now looking to roll out those policies in their Malaysian offices too. However, the law can be very different across jurisdictions, and employers will need to tread with caution and consider not just the legal but practical repercussions before making vaccinations mandatory for their employees.
In this article, I set out the legal position on this issue, and the key issues employers need to consider. I’ve also previously shared some of my views on this with The Malay Mail in their piece earlier this month — “Can Malaysian employers make Covid-19 vaccinations mandatory for their staff? Lawyers explain.”
