Yeah, and just to add some context for people who might not be familiar with US healthcare, what the VP is asking for is effectively impossible, so this is an order to work sick. The majority of Americans cannot just "go to the doctor" whenever they feel like it, especially 4 days before Christmas. The best most people could do in this situation is call a doctor's office and be told they can get an appointment in a couple months, or go to the emergency room if it's an emergency. So the choice here if you're sick is to waste emergency healthcare workers' time and probably pay extra for unnecessary emergency care, go to work sick, or get fired.
This is obviously intentional, and in many parts of the US totally legal. I don't know specific Colorado laws but there is no federal law against this.
Urgent care facilities typically have less than a 2 hour wait time in every place in the US I've been, and cost about $0-60 per visit depending on insurance.
Scheduling is not an issue, and there is no need to waste an ED's time on such things. Some urgent care spots specifically have a "doctors note" service.
It doesn't make the policy any better (I've worked such jobs), but I don't think there is a need to exaggerate how the process works in real life.
When I'm sick, but not dying, the last thing I want to do is haul myself out to an urgent care unnecessarily to spend money and time, and be in the presence of other sick people. This is detrimental to getting better as soon as possible. Thankfully my employer trusts me, and I don't have to go running to an urgent care every time I get a cold (which they can do nothing about anyway).
A few years back (peak-Covid) I was working for a company helping with temp staffing. It was shocking to me to see the operational expectations for low-wage labor. Clients would pay absolute minimum wage or maybe a dollar/hr more for all sorts of roles then be dumbfounded that workers were flaky.
An airport subcontractor came to us having issues with getting enough baggage workers. Issue was they paid minimum wage, were located 30 minutes outside the city, and there was no public transport. There was no way for the workers to get to the job! The narrative was "these worker are so untrustworthy/lazy/full of excuses." So they would pay a 50% to an agency hoping gig-contractors could save them on single-day contracts rather than just putting that money to better wages or transit perks.
Contempt really does describe the management attitudes I ran into.
Air traffic controllers had a union until 1981, when Reagan's aw-shucks niceness led him to abruptly and unilaterally disband PATCO and fire all the striking controllers. PATCO had endorsed Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
> "Telemedicine or Telehealth doctor notes will not be accepted"
It's worse than contempt, it's abuse. He is looking for ways to make recovery from illness more difficult than it needs to be, and in turn hope some will come to work when they can't get a "regular" doctor visit in time - during a holiday week.
On the flip side Southwest has stranded what look like tens of thousands of passengers. The memo seems to be focused on curing that problem. It's not clear what the alternative(s) would look like short of ditching all their passengers.
It looks like this is not a fun week for anyone who works at Southwest.
That memo was sent before the storm and before anyone was stranded. It was an attempt to prevent a future crisis. If your goal is to prevent a future crisis, alternatives to ramping up employee abuse 3 days before a big storm might be:
1. Hiring more people (more than 3 days in advance).
2. Paying people more so they don't quit.
3. Giving people paid sick time and not threatening their jobs when they take it so that they don't come to work sick and get a bunch of their colleagues sick.
4. Selling fewer tickets and running fewer flights if you don't have enough capacity to support the current workload.
