Lawmakers have agreed to a short-term COVID-19 recovery package that drops both Republicans’ demand for employer liability waivers and Democrats’ proposed aid to state and local governments, teeing up a potential return to that long-running battle in the early days of President-elect Joe Biden’s term.
A bipartisan group of senators that has been seeking to negotiate a compromise COVID-19 relief bill has failed to find common ground on combining funding provisions with employer liability relief and OSHA enforcement, and has split the workplace issues into a separate measure that employee safety advocates strongly oppose.
House and Senate Democrats say a bipartisan plan for short-term COVID-19 economic relief that includes a temporary federal liability waiver for employers against coronavirus-related lawsuits could help restart talks with the GOP, but the bill’s fate is in doubt as the White House and Senate Republican leadership are resisting the effort.
Five Democratic senators are pushing the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) to quickly craft a long-pending update to its silica standard in response to a recent Office of Inspector General (OIG) report that found its current policies to be “out of date” and insufficiently protective of workers’ health.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is among the contenders voicing interest in becoming labor secretary as President-elect Joe Biden begins to assemble his Cabinet, but industry and employer associations are warning Democrats that any nominee viewed as too far left could struggle to win confirmation in a closely divided Senate.
Employer liability remains a major unresolved issue in the ongoing talks between Democrats, Republicans and the White House over a potential new COVID-19 stimulus bill, with many in the GOP caucus demanding its inclusion in such a bill despite long-running Democratic opposition to any such waiver for companies.
Top Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee are attacking OSHA’s recent guidance on reporting worker hospitalizations and deaths from COVID-19 as a move to “eliminate, for all practical purposes” mandatory reporting of workplace infections, and demanding details on how the agency crafted the policy.
The collapse of bipartisan talks on COVID-19 relief and President Donald Trump’s vow not to field any new offers until after the election all but kills GOP plans to insert employee liability waivers in the bill and Democrats’ hopes of using the legislation as a vehicle to force OSHA to issue an emergency virus safety standard.
Democrats have unveiled a scaled-back version of their COVID-19 relief package in what could be their final effort to restart negotiations with the White House ahead of the November elections, but even the more limited bill maintains the demand for an OSHA standard to address the virus, potentially dooming it in the Senate.
Lawmakers have agreed to extend current funding for OSHA and other executive agencies to Dec. 11, delaying a battle over potential fiscal year 2021 budget cuts or boosts until after the election -- and likely after the Senate battle over confirming a successor to the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.