National Nurses United (NNU) is attacking the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for its recent move advancing a draft infection control guidance for healthcare settings with just days of public input, charging that the agency is sidestepping public input while weakening protections for medical workers and others.
The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) plans to launch a discretionary audit in fiscal year 2024 to determine whether OSHA has remedied what the watchdog office said were deep flaws in its pandemic-era enforcement program in a report issued less than a year ago.
OSHA has signed an enforcement settlement with the pharmacy giant Rite Aid that will require new worker protections against bloodborne pathogens at “approximately 370” stores in two states, after the agency found violations of that standard at a Niagara Falls, NY, location in 2022.
Republicans on the House COVID-19 committee have opened an investigation of OSHA’s development and implementation of its now-abandoned COVID-19 vaccination rule, probing how the standard came to be and requesting extensive documentation and communications from the agency to investigate “any wrongdoing by government officials.”
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) is urging OSHA to craft a safety standard for meat and poultry workers that would cover infectious disease in a new report that says the agency’s “continuing challenges” in the sector have been deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic, and that it “missed opportunities” to collaborate with other authorities to address them.
OSHA is seeking to release by the end of this month long-awaited final rules on both electronic recordkeeping mandates and COVID-19 infection controls in healthcare facilities, alongside several proposed policies, while delaying other rulemakings from their previous timelines -- some by over a year, according to its latest Unified Agenda of rulemaking actions.
Members of the California legislature have introduced a bill that would reimburse employers’ costs for complying with the state OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) COVID-19 worker-safety standard in 2023 and 2024 through a new tax credit, with support from agriculture groups that have attacked the standard as unnecessary, overly burdensome and costly.
California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) standards board has narrowly voted to recommend that agency staff add “exclusion pay” requirements to a forthcoming long-term infectious disease standard for general industry, renewing debate over the mandate after officials dropped it from new COVID-19 safety standards.
Healthcare employers and trade groups representing an array of other, overlapping sectors are continuing to push OSHA to either drop its plan for a final COVID-19 safety standard in healthcare workplaces, or tie it strictly to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance, as the White House advances its review of the rule.
Labor groups are urging the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to tighten OSHA’s final safety standard for COVID-19 exposure in healthcare workplaces beyond the emergency requirements the agency imposed in 2021, focusing in particular on calls to exceed Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidelines for the pandemic.