OSHA failing to protect workers during COVID-19 pandemic

The Trump administration is failing to protect the nation’s workers from COVID-19, according to presenters at Sunday’s APHA Annual Meeting session “COVID-19: the Greatest Workplace Safety and Health Disaster in our Lifetime,” organized by APHA’s Occupational Health and Safety Section.

“The most salient and important fact is that the administration had no plan to protect health care workers or any of the other millions of essential workers that would be required to stay at work,” said speaker Debbie Berkowitz, worker safety and health program director at the National Employment Law Project. “And they don’t have a plan now, as more workers are required to go back to work.”

Berkowitz provided a summary of the “cascade of failures,” which include not invoking the Defense Production Act to address the initial and ongoing shortage of N95 respirators for health care workers.

“From the very beginning of the pandemic, we knew that workplace exposures to COVID-19 would be a main driver of this pandemic,” she said. “Ten months later they still are, even though (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is not collecting, nor releasing, comprehensive data.”

For example, at least 40,000 meatpacking and poultry workers have been infected with COVID-19, according to Berkowitz, who highlighted an October 2020 Harvard study that found a correlation between COVID-19-related workplace complaints filed with the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and deaths 17 days later.

Other failures, she said, include:

• refusing to mandate any workplace protections through OSHA;
• not responding to employee complaints and inspecting workplaces; and
• previously halting all work on an airborne infectious disease standard that would have better prepared the health care sector for a pandemic.

“Government malfeasance has consequences,” she said. “Workers got sick and died.”

OSHA failures before the pandemic
But even before the pandemic arrived, workers’ protections were declining, said Rebecca Reindel, director of occupational safety and health at the AFL-CIO.

OSHA currently has the lowest number of inspectors ever at 1,767, according to Reindel. Furthermore, the OSHA budget amounts to just $3.54 per worker, and it would take 162 years to inspect every U.S. workplace at least once.

Under the Trump administration, OSHA also changed its “weighting system,” which had given more weight to certain types of inspections based on the time it took to do them or their impact on workplace health and safety.

“Changing the system makes it appear as though they are doing more inspections, but they’re actually doing (fewer) significant and complex, comprehensive inspections,” Reindel told attendees.

How OSHA can protect workers in the pandemic
What can be done? David Michaels, former assistant secretary of labor at OSHA under President Obama and currently a professor at George Washington University, outlined several recommendations to improve employee protections based on a report he co-wrote, “Halting Workplace COVID-19 Transmission: An Urgent Proposal to Protect American Workers.” 

The path forward must be a national effort — beyond OSHA rules and enforcement — to stop workplace transmission, Michaels said.

“The government needs to make stopping transmission of COVID-19 in the workplace a major part of its activities because if you don’t stop workplace transmission, you’re not going to stop the epidemic,” he said.

There must be improvements in providing N95 respirators, tracking and tracing, and strengthening the supply chain of COVID-19 tests. Michaels called on the federal government to pay for employer-based testing; otherwise, he said, employers willing to pay and test their employees face a financial disadvantage over competitors unwilling to pay for tests.

OSHA also needs to establish workplace rules, such as requiring masks and limiting indoor work gatherings by size and density. The agency should issue an emergency temporary standard, which would make enforcement easier and faster because the COVID-19 rules would be clear, Michaels said.

In the longer run, Michaels said a weakened OSHA offers an opportunity to reimagine the agency and build it back up with bold thinking.

“Let’s figure out the mistakes we made in the past and let’s rebuild differently,” Michaels told session attendees. “The objective has to be that no worker ever gets hurt at work.”

Photo by Zorann, courtesy iStockphoto