Alabama DOL issues emergency rule to request COVID-19 vaccine exemption

The Alabama Department of Labor (ADOL) has issued an emergency rule to explain how employees can request an exemption from employers’ COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

How we got here

On November 5, 2021, Governor Kay Ivey signed Alabama Act 2021-561 (Senate Bill 9) into law. The law requires any employer implementing a vaccine mandate to provide employees with the opportunity to apply for medical or religious exemptions. It also dictated a form employers must use for the application.

If an exemption request is rejected, the employee can appeal first to the ADOL and then to the local county circuit court. The Act gave the agency until November 26 to issue the rules to implement the appeals process.

No space between legislation, regulation

The ADOL’s regulation (available in full here) did little more than to parrot the law, dashing the faint hopes of any employer that the agency would exclude companies with bona fide federal law/regulation/guidance conflicts with the Alabama statute from the scope of appeal.

The ADOL was clear its close repetition of the law was no accident. The regulation instructs administrative law judges (ALJs) reviewing employee appeals essentially to do nothing else than to ensure the application form was completed correctly.