In the early days of his administration, President Biden directed the nation’s workplace safety regulator to explore enforceable Covid-19 standards to better protect workers from the threat of the coronavirus. But months later, the new standards have not been issued, worrying advocates concerned about the health of vulnerable workers.
As a candidate, Biden was critical of how the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) had handled the pandemic under the Trump administration, when scores of worker complaints were never investigated. Then, in January, Biden directed the agency to investigate the need for an emergency temporary standard (ETS) — a major demand of Congressional Democrats and labor leaders — which would create enforceable Covid-19 safety standards for employers. So far, federal agencies have released only voluntary guidelines for employers.
The assessment, which Biden requested by March 15, is now more than a month overdue. After being heartened by Biden’s early support for the ETS, its proponents are now concerned about the delay, especially given the ongoing risk to the workers who process and package food. A recent report by FERN found that food system workers still face challenging and unsafe workplace conditions, and that dozens of meat and food processing plants experienced repeat outbreaks of the virus last year even as media coverage of the pandemic’s effect on the sector’s workers subsided.
“For workers in many sectors, the emergency is still now. This is still urgent,” said Karen Perry Stillerman, a senior strategist and analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “People are still at risk in the workplace. That means that their families and their communities are at risk.”
The Department of Labor has so far been noncommittal about a potential timeline for the ETS. Marty Walsh, the new labor secretary, said in a recent MSNBC interview that the agency is “looking at this … just to see before we move forward with any kind of standard, if we need to move forward with a standard.”
FERN has tracked nearly 90,000 Covid-19 cases and 383 deaths among food system workers nationwide. About 60,000 of those cases are linked to meatpacking plants. There have been outbreaks at more than 570 of the nation’s meat plants; the locations of fewer than half of them are known because of a lack of transparent data reporting by companies and state and local health departments.
The effects of those outbreaks haven’t been limited to plant workers. A recent study in the journal Food Policy found that 334,000 Covid-19 cases were tied to outbreaks at meatpacking plants nationwide. The presence of a large meatpacking plant in an area increased transmission rates by as much as 160 percent.
At the Seaboard Foods pork processing plant in Guymon, Oklahoma, where in the past year more than 1,000 workers contracted Covid-19 and 6 died of the virus, union leaders say an ETS is essential to keep workers safer at this stage of the pandemic. For months, Seaboard has failed to adequately distance workers, provide sick leave, or offer training in all necessary languages, according to a complaint filed with OSHA by the United Food and Commercial Workers union (UFCW) Local 2 in early April.
“During and after lunch breaks, you have hundreds of people all congregated in small spaces in the plant,” says Martin Rosas, the union president. “When you move to the production side, the line speed is extremely high, and that doesn’t allow people to distance. You see people working shoulder to shoulder without masks, or masks not being replaced.”
Seaboard has denied the union’s charges and said it is complying with local and federal guidelines. But those voluntary guidelines, released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and OSHA last year, have not gone far enough to protect workers, Rosas said. A federal enforceable standard is particularly important for meatpacking workers because many are immigrants and working in non-unionized plants.
“If [Seaboard] completely ignores the requests from the union, I can’t imagine what’s happening elsewhere in this industry,” he said.
Food retail and restaurant workers also remain vulnerable to the spread of Covid-19. A recent study from the University of California-San Francisco found line cooks to be at the highest risk of dying from Covid-19 of any essential worker group. “We know food workers are the most at risk, the most underpaid, and these are jobs filled disproportionately by people of color and immigrants,” said Elizabeth Walle, development coordinator for the Food Chain Workers Alliance. “If OSHA fails to issue an ETS, the implications for food workers are dire.”
Debbie Berkowitz, the worker safety and health program director at the National Employment Law Project, said controlling workplace spread of Covid-19 is essential to ending the pandemic.
Covid-19 is “the largest occupational health crisis since OSHA was created in 1970,” she said. “To mitigate against the spread of Covid-19 in the public, you must mitigate the spread at work, and that is why the ETS is crucial.”
That Doug Parker, who until recently headed the California workplace safety agency Cal/OSHA, was recently nominated to lead OSHA may be a good sign for the ETS. Last fall, California passed its own emergency standards, which require employers to distance workers, provide training, and take other precautionary measures. California has also levied higher fines against agricultural employers for pandemic-related violations than most other states and federal OSHA.
But Parker’s confirmation hearing is not yet scheduled, and advocates say the timeline for an ETS is urgent.
“Everyone firmly expected these standards to be issued in short order, so there’s a lot of consternation,” Stillerman said.