Protecting All of Long Island’s Essential Employees
A call to include Essential Manufacturing in New York State’s Phased Distribution of Covid19 Vaccination
Long Island boasts over 3,000 manufacturing shops across 11 different industry sectors such as Pharmaceutical, Biotech, Food & Beverage, Aerospace & Defense among, others. These businesses are critical resources to the COVID-19 response and recovery, they are crucial to sustaining strategic food banks, and they are essential to our national defense posture. These industries are not included in New York State’s Phased Vaccination plan, IgniteLI calls on State leaders to include essential manufacturing employees as eligible recipients of the COVID-19 vaccine. Doing so ensures that our critical industries can continue operating and supplying medical professionals, food pantries, and the Department of Defense with the necessary supplies they need to ensure prosperity.
Essential Manufacturing implies manufacturers impacted by the Defense Procurement Act, Operation Warp Speed, all Department of Defense suppliers, Personal Protective Equipment manufacturers, Food & Beverage producers, Pharmaceutical & Nutraceutical suppliers, Biotechnical manufacturers, and suppliers to essential manufacturing & Distribution.
“Business tenants at the Long Island Innovation Park at Hauppauge generate eight percent of Long Island’s entire gross domestic product, and many of these businesses are manufacturers,” said HIA-LI President and CEO Terri Alessi-Miceli. “Moreover, 58 percent of our tenants bring wealth into the region because their goods and services are exportable to other locations. That’s more than two-and-a-half times the Island-wide percentage. For these reasons manufacturing companies should be included in the state’s vaccination plan.” Yesterday, Long Island saw 1,175 new cases across Nassau & Suffolk counties. While national trends are showing positive signs, local spikes can be crippling to our small businesses producing essential products. “Essential manufacturing employers like A&Z Pharmaceutical have been uniquely disrupted by the effects of the pandemic. For example, while many service industry employers have pivoted with relative ease to productive remote work arrangements, manufacturing relies on employees leveraging complex and highly specialized equipment on the employer’s premises,” said A&Z Pharmaceutical President Emma Lee. “With no remote work option, a quarantined employee is completely unable to produce. Because of these unique challenges, it is absolutely essential that manufacturing employees are immediately included as eligible recipients of the COVID-19 vaccines.” The nature of Manufacturing dictates that it is conducted “on-site” requiring employees to gather in confined spaces to complete orders. While in compliance with OSHA and CDC regulations & guidelines, this environment is still prone to COVID-19 outbreaks and spreading. Ultimately, there are no options for manufacturers to operate virtually, if employees of essential manufacturing are required to be present on shop floors, the government must offer employees the opportunity to be vaccinated.
Long Island’s most vulnerable populations are also the most impacted on manufacturing shop floors. By demographics, across all manufacturing the majority of employees are above the age of 55, further, the minority population working in these critical industries is higher by density than most other sectors. If New York State were to make Essential Manufacturing Employees eligible, we could efficiently vaccinate a vast population of Long Island’s most at-risk workers.
By opening these employees to vaccinations, we protect our critical COVID-19 response and recovery supply chain. This population of workers is particularly vulnerable to the virus given their age and demographic, by making these employees eligible, effectively bringing at-risk populations closer to heard immunology. Long Island’s Manufacturing community appreciates and thanks New York State’s governmental leaders for their hard work and dedication to our State’s economic development always, but especially during the COVID-19 outbreak. We understand the monumental task during these unprecedented times and look forward to working with our governmental leaders as we move past the COVID-19 outbreak.
3/17/2021
Patrick D. Boyle
Executive Director
IgniteLI, the Manufacturing Consortium of Long Island
