I’m lucky that my employer has a vaccine mandate. But it doesn’t mean the bosses are keeping us safe: we all need paid sick leave and job protections to survive COVID-19.

Vaccine mandates work. They’re helping to ensure that many Americans — reluctant though they may be to protect themselves — won’t die of COVID-19. While some unions have objected to vaccine mandates — not only police and corrections officers’ unions, which are typically reactionary, but also New York City’s DC 37 and some other public employees’ unions — I’m happy to report that my union, a UAW local representing adjunct professors, has embraced the measure. Some unions, mostly representing service workers, have even demanded that employers impose such mandates. That makes sense: everyone should have the right to a safe workplace, and these days, that should mean protection from unvaccinated people, whenever possible. Workers and unions who see the right to refuse a vaccine as a matter of liberty are wrong; when your freedoms imperil other people’s lives and health, they exit the realm of personal choice and become the kinds of freedoms only Rand Paul or the fossil fuel industry could love.

What I’ve just written is a divisive opinion. Mandates are needed, but the discourse around them is a risky one. Vaccine mandates divide workers. Equally troublingly, they allow bosses to pose as reasonable fans of science who care about their workers and about public health, an unusual opportunity for an employer class that has knowingly sent those working in warehouses, slaughterhouses, hospitals, and many other dangerously infected workplaces to their deaths throughout this pandemic. Workers and unions opposing vaccine mandates are not only wrong on the health and science; they’re also enabling these unfortunate optics in which bosses look smarter and more caring than the rest of us. Most likely, that’s why controversy over vaccine mandates gets so much media coverage: the division among workers stokes outrage on both sides — and therefore clicks — plus, the corporate media doesn’t mind making bosses look good.