When the AFL-CIO put out its most recent worker safety report in October 2020, the numbers were appalling. More than 5,200 workers had died on the job, and an estimated 95,000 succumbed to occupational diseases. Those statistics meant that, on average, 275 workers a day died either from a work-related accident or illness.
But that report covered the state of workplace safety in 2018.
And then came the pandemic. It’s difficult to determine just how many workers have died from exposure to the coronavirus on the job. But we do know that tens of thousands of workers have contracted COVID-19, and that healthcare workers and those working in food processing plants have been among the hardest hit, with workers of color disproportionately affected. The Guardian reported that as of February 2021, 3,500 healthcare workers alone died from the coronavirus over the past year.
OSHA MIA during Pandemic
Beginning in March 2020, unions and worker safety advocates called on the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration to do more to protect workers from the pandemic.
It was a battle they failed to win. “Even before the pandemic, the Trump administration had worked pretty diligently to weaken OSHA, already a weak agency,” says Deborah Berkowitz, who directs the National Employment Law Project’s worker safety and health program. As the pandemic hit, OSHA had “the least amount of inspectors on staff” in its nearly 50-year history, she adds.
The agency had no Senate-confirmed head after Trump’s nominee for the job, Scott Mugno, waited 19 months for confirmation and then withdrew his name from consideration. But it was clear who was running the show at OSHA – Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and a corporate lawyer whose career had been spent fighting regulations his clients opposed.
Scalia “essentially shut the agency down,” Berkowitz says. “He decided that they weren’t going to do inspections, which is how OSHA enforces the law... When workers complained and filed complaints, they [OSHA] were not going to issue any specific requirements for employers. They would let employers just decide to do whatever they wanted to do.”
Last July, OSHA reported that it had received nearly 8,000 worker complaints related to coronavirus, but had issued only four citations of companies.
COVID “spread like wildfire”
When the pandemic began, Berkowitz says, “the consequences were huge. COVID started to spread like wildfire in meat and poultry plants and nursing homes.” Workplaces were not requiring employees to be socially distanced, sick employees were required to return to work, and everyone was working “shoulder to shoulder,” she says. They didn’t start giving workers masks until “way late in April.”
Workers were crowded together in break rooms and locker rooms, she adds. “OSHA ignored it.”
“That is the OSHA the Biden-Harris administration inherited,” she says. NELP and unions were pleased that Biden issued an executive order on workplace safety “on day two” of his term, she says.
Biden tries to revive an ailing agency
“The executive order told OSHA to do three things,” Berkowitz says. One was to issue updated guidance about workplace safety during the pandemic. The “very good” guidance OSHA subsequently released doesn’t require employers to follow its advice, but at least “it tells employers what to do if they want to do the right thing.”
Biden directed OSHA to “start enforcement,” she says.
And most importantly, Biden told OSHA to consider whether it needs to issue a temporary emergency standard on workplace safety during the pandemic. If it decides an emergency temporary standard is necessary, the order gives OSHA a deadline of March 15 to issue it.
Labor advocates have no doubt that the Biden OSHA will issue that standard. And while Biden has not yet nominated someone to head OSHA, progressives are pleased with the people he’s named to positions that don’t require confirmation. Even before he was inaugurated, Biden announced that he would name James Frederick deputy assistant secretary for occupational safety and health. Frederick has a strong background in worker safety.
At the same time, Biden said he would appoint Joseph Hughes as deputy assistant secretary for pandemic and emergency response for OSHA. Hughes ran an organization that gives grants to unions and nonprofits to train workers about occupational safety and health.
“They really listened to the concerns of workers through NELP and through the unions,” Berkowitz says. To have “people there right at the start” can help an agency “in a terrible state,” she says, noting that many career leadership positions are vacant. “Nobody wanted to work for the Trump administration,” she says.
CDC’s inaction
But while NELP’s Berkowitz is confident that Biden’s OSHA will deliver, the AFL-CIO’s Rebecca Reindel has some concerns about getting a binding standard for employers in place as soon as possible.
One major obstacle is the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC guidelines on workplace safety are out of date, experts say, because they don’t recognize the role that airborne transmission plays in spreading COVID-19 in the workplace. An updated CDC recommendation “is absolutely critical to OSHA getting a strong standard out the door,” says Reindel, the AFL-CIO’s safety and health director. The current guidelines, Reindel says, “are based on outdated science.
“OSHA is the workplace safety expert ... but they will be leaning heavily on what CDC says” in order to have “one voice out of the administration.”
Labor unions aren’t the only groups urging the CDC to update its recommendations. On February 15, 13 health experts, including former Obama administration OSHA head David Michaels, wrote to key administration officials, including the CDC’s director, urging the CDC to update its workplace recommendations to reflect the most up-to-date science on transmission of the virus, making clear the dangers of “inhalation exposure” to the coronavirus in certain high-risk workplaces with poor ventilation, where people are indoors, together for long periods of time, breathing the same air, and not adequately protected by cloth or surgical masks.
The letter urged CDC to advise better ventilation and higher-quality masks for workers in the most danger—those working in healthcare settings, in food processing and prisons.
“Stronger protective measures are needed immediately to limit exposure and transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 virus to control and end the COVID-19 pandemic,” the scientists urged, noting that Austria, Germany and France have already taken stronger steps.
“Until the CDC makes some changes, OSHA will have difficulty changing the recommendations it puts up because there’s an understanding the government has to be consistent,” Michaels told the New York Times.
On March 1, the Democratic chairs of four powerful House committees sent their own letter to administration officials, making the same request.
“CDC needs to act more quickly and to be working with OSHA directly,” Reindel says. “They can’t just be an agency doing their own thing. They need to work with workplace safety experts to understand how this [science on airborne transmission] translates to these especially high-risk settings.”
“We know [the OSHA standard] is a priority for the administration,” Reindel says. “That’s a very good thing... But the administration needs to act very quickly.”
