Is It Legal for a Company to Terminate an Employee for Not Getting Vaccinated?
According to Article 125 of the 2019 Labor Code stipulating the application of the disciplinary form of dismissal, specifically:
The disciplinary form of dismissal can be applied by the employer in the following cases:
The employee commits acts of theft, embezzlement, gambling, deliberate infliction of injury, or drug use at the workplace;
The employee discloses business secrets, technological secrets, infringes on the intellectual property rights of the employer, commits acts causing serious damage or threatens to cause particularly serious damage to the property or interests of the employer, or sexually harasses others at the workplace as stipulated in the labor regulations;
The employee is subjected to disciplinary actions such as delayed wage increase or demotion and repeats the offense during the period when the previous discipline has not been expunged. Repetition of the offense refers to the case where the employee repeats the violations that have been disciplined and has not had the disciplinary record expunged according to the provisions of Article 126 of this Code;
The employee voluntarily quits work for a total of 05 cumulative days within a period of 30 days or 20 cumulative days within a period of 365 days from the first unauthorized leave day without a legitimate reason.
Cases considered to have a legitimate reason include natural disasters, fires, the employee's own illness or that of a family member with certification from an authorized medical facility, and other cases stipulated in the labor regulations.
Thus, the employer is only allowed to apply the disciplinary form of dismissal for the cases stated above. Therefore, in our view, the company's reason for dismissing an employee for not receiving the Covid-19 vaccine is unfounded.
Furthermore, currently, Covid-19 vaccination is based on the voluntary participation of citizens and is not compulsory. You can refer to the following article: Is there a penalty for not getting a Covid-19 vaccine?
Respectfully!
