The nation’s top workplace safety enforcer, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), will explore issuing enforceable workplace safety standards to protect workers from the spread of Covid-19 as part of President Joe Biden’s new pandemic strategy. Labor advocates and congressional Democrats have pushed for enforceable standards for the duration of the pandemic, arguing that the existing voluntary guidelines for employers don’t go far enough to protect workers — including those in essential workplaces like meatpacking and food processing plants — from the spread of the virus.
In his 200-page plan, the National Strategy for the COVID-19 Response and Pandemic Preparedness, Biden directs OSHA to “issue updated guidance on COVID-19 worker protections, and to consider whether emergency temporary standards, including with respect to mask wearing, are necessary.” If the agency does decide to issue emergency standards, it should do so by March 15, according to an executive order signed by the president on Thursday.
“[F]or the millions of workers — many of whom are people of color, immigrants, and low-wage workers — who continue to put their lives on the line to keep this country going through the pandemic, I’m calling for the enforcement of more stringent worker safety standards so that you are better protected from this virus while you have to continue to work,” Biden said at a White House event before signing the executive order.
The Trump administration’s hands-off approach to workplace safety enforcement and its use of voluntary guidelines was criticized by labor and public health advocates, who saw the measures as insufficient for curtailing the rampant spread of the virus in meatpacking plants and other high-risk workplaces. Under Trump, OSHA conducted relatively few workplace inspections in response to worker complaints about Covid-19 exposure, and issued only small fines to meatpackers whose workers had been sickened or even died in outbreaks.
Some states, including California and Virginia, have issued their own emergency workplace safety standards that go beyond the federal guidelines. FERN found that states with their own OSHA offices have fined agricultural employers significantly more than the federal agency.
“This order is a total reversal of the Trump administration’s dangerous strategy to sideline OSHA during the worst public health and occupational health crisis since the agency was created 50 years ago,” said Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, in a statement. “This order will have a significant impact on improving the health and lives of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and immigrant workers who are disproportionately represented in many of the essential industries with the highest risk of spread of COVID-19.”
In addition to enforceable standards, workplace safety advocates want Biden to fill vacancies at OSHA within his first 100 days and to emphasize enforcement at meat and poultry facilities, where tens of thousands of workers have contracted Covid. More than 82,000 workers at meatpacking and food processing plants and on farms have contracted Covid-19 since the pandemic began, and at least 361 have died, according to FERN’s latest tally.