Attorneys say employers should be ready to quickly resume compliance with a host of Obama-era OSHA policies linked to its contentious electronic reporting rule, including anti-retaliation measures that barred many workplace safety incentives, as the agency prepares to propose a new version of the regulation as soon as December.
November 15, 2026
OSHA has reworked a long-standing “interpretive rule” to specify that proving whistleblower retaliation requires showing that protected activity was the “but-for” cause of an employer’s discriminatory action, based on several recent Supreme Court decisions the agency had already incorporated into less-formal guidance.
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Worker-safety and environmental groups are seeking alternative paths to a comprehensive emergency temporary standard (ETS) for heat illness including a push for state-level policies, citing concerns that OSHA lacks the staff or resources to quickly craft such a rule alongside its top priority of responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
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A new Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) raises the already-high bar OSHA must clear to cite employers for a willful violation of its noise exposure standard, holding that the agency must go beyond showing that an employer had a heightened awareness of the standard.
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OSHA’s nationwide suicide-prevention training initiative for the construction sector could build a record to support for formal guidance or even enforcement action, several employers’ attorneys tell Inside OSHA, though they say the agency is likely to face an uphill battle if it does pursue that path.
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Labor groups are urging OSHA to rework and make permanent its temporary COVID-19 standard, including calls from nurses to mandate vaccination for health workers while general-industry unions hope to extend the rule to all sectors and decouple it from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines.
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Health care employers say OSHA’s COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) conflicts with Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance and say recent findings supports loosening key provisions in the rule, alongside calls to delay implementation by up to six months and scrap plans to enact a permanent version of the ETS.
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OSHA is launching a novel nationwide suicide-prevention training initiative for the construction sector, expanding on a 2020 regional effort based in part on a study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that found the industry’s suicide rate was four times higher than that of the general population.
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A recently published study suggests that existing California OSHA (Cal/OSHA) standards for heat-related illness (HRI) do not adequately protect the state’s agricultural workers and recommends reforms similar to those labor groups and others are seeking in their petition for an OSHA heat standard.
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