On March 12, in direct response to a January executive order from President Joe Biden, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration launched an initiative to boost its efforts to protect workers at the highest risk of contracting COVID-19 on the job.
OSHA said it will focus its inspection and enforcement efforts on “companies that put the largest number of workers at serious risk of contracting the coronavirus,” while protecting workers against retaliation for logging complaints about those risks through the new national program.
The program comes after Biden issued an executive order on Jan. 21, saying, “Ensuring the health and safety of workers is a national priority and a moral imperative.” He added that health care and other essential workers, “many of whom are people of color and immigrants, have put their lives on the line” during the pandemic.
Jim Frederick, the agency’s principal deputy assistant secretary, said in a statement, “This program seeks to substantially reduce or eliminate coronavirus exposure for workers in companies where risks are high, and to protect workers who raise concerns that their employer is failing to protect them from the risks of exposure.”
The program adds vigor to OSHA’s oversight of “high hazard” industries that expose the highest number of workers to “serious risk,” including hospitals, assisted living centers, nursing homes, and other health care and emergency response providers treating COVID-19 patients. OSHA will also conduct both new inspections as well as follow-ups of work sites inspected in 2020 to make sure that potentially hazardous conditions have been corrected. OSHA’s own compliance safety and health officers will have “every protection necessary” for the inspections, the agency said.
Additionally, according to the memo, workplaces or settings with high numbers of coronavirus-related complaints or cases will come under greater scrutiny, including correctional facilities, meatpacking plants, poultry processing plants, and grocery stores.
OSHA will distribute anti-retaliation information during inspections, providing additional outreach opportunities for would-be tipsters and “promptly referring” retaliation allegations to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Whistleblower Protection Program.
The agency has stated that the program would remain in effect for up to a year, with the flexibility to amend or terminate the program as the pandemic wanes. While 28 states and territories have adopted their own state-specific OSHA-approved protections for employees and implemented similar enforcement programs, the agency added that it “strongly encourages” the remaining states to adopt the federal program.
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