Commentary
For nearly a year, the lives of LA city employees who have chosen not to be vaccinated for COVID-19 have been turned upside down as they live each day with uncertainty and find themselves navigating a Kafkaesque labyrinth of local government bureaucracy.
The reason for this is Ordinance No. 187134. Passed and approved by the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Eric Garcetti in the summer of 2021, the ordinance henceforth required all current and future city employees of Los Angeles to be vaccinated for COVID-19 barring approval for a medical or religious exemption.
However, city employees who sought religious exemptions through the proper procedures sometimes still found themselves lost in the purgatory of an opaque process, seemingly rigged against them by faceless bureaucrats….