OSHA is providing new guidance for employers to review workers’ self-administered COVID-19 tests under its pandemic emergency temporary standard (ETS), warning that while such tests can satisfy the rule’s requirement for weekly testing of unvaccinated employees they must be either read or observed by a third party.
November 15, 2026
OSHA has confirmed that it is withdrawing most of its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) for healthcare facilities but says it still plans a permanent rulemaking for the sector and will continue enforcement action in the interim under the OSH Act’s general duty clause.
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The Supreme Court announced Dec. 22 that it will hear oral argument Jan. 7 in litigation over both OSHA’s vaccine-or-test emergency temporary standard (ETS) for large employers and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) vaccine mandate for many health workers, linking the two high-profile challenges to federal pandemic powers.
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OSHA Dec. 21 allowed its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) for healthcare workers to expire, spurring criticism from healthcare and workers’ rights advocates and calls for the agency to “expeditiously” issue a permanent standard to protect frontline medical workers amid a fresh spike in cases from the Omicron variant.
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A new decision by the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) holds for apparently the first time that road construction companies must adopt fall-protection measures for employees working from the backs of moving vehicles, but the panel took no clear position on what abatement methods the employers must use.
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OSHA plans to start enforcing its COVID-19 vaccination emergency temporary standard (ETS) on Jan. 10, with employer vaccine policies to take effect Feb. 9 -- provided employers make “good faith efforts” to comply -- after a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit voted 2-1 to dissolve an earlier order staying the rule.
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The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit has denied petitions for initial en banc review of the consolidated challenges to OSHA’s vaccine emergency temporary standard (ETS), opening the field of judges who could potentially serve on a three-judge panel to decide whether to lift an injunction blocking the standard’s adoption.
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Worker-safety advocates are urging OSHA to promulgate a disaster-response standard to ensure that employers are prepared for extreme weather-related events, in the aftermath of recent tornados that leveled workplaces across the Midwest and killed at least six workers at an Illinois Amazon warehouse and eight at a Kentucky candle factory.
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OSHA plans to propose this month a rulemaking to withdraw state plan status from Arizona, according to its newly released Unified Agenda for regulatory actions that also targets May for a proposal that would grant partial state plan status to Massachusetts and sets updated timelines for a host of previously announced rulemakings.
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Animal welfare and labor rights advocates are taking aim at the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) new “time-limited trials” allowing some poultry and pork slaughterhouses to raise line speeds if they implement worker safety measures, saying they see little difference from a speed-waiver program that a court scrapped earlier this year.
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