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.
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.
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.
An alliance of worker groups, environmentalists and others is petitioning OSHA to craft an emergency temporary standard (ETS) for heat illness even though the agency has begun to craft a permanent rule on the subject, arguing that the years-long regulatory process is too slow to protect workers from heat waves driven by climate change.
OSHA is asking stakeholders to weigh in on a host of issues it says will inform the first-ever update to its 1971 safety standard for mechanical power presses, including whether to expand the rule to cover currently-excluded hydraulic and pneumatic presses, and whether to use an industry consensus standard as a basis for the revision.
Incoming OSHA chief Doug Parker could seek to tighten the agency’s COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) following his expected confirmation, an employer attorney said during a July 22 webinar, based on his record of strict regulation as California’s top safety official and the spike in infections due to the virus’s “Delta” variant.
White House officials have completed their review of OSHA’s long-delayed request for information designed to shape its first-ever update to the safety standard for mechanical power presses -- a rule that dates to 1971, and which the agency sought unsuccessfully to rework during the George W. Bush administration.
Environmentalists and industry groups are starting to draw battle lines over how or whether the Biden administration should revise the Trump-era rule governing chemical facility-safety requirements, with environmentalists urging officials to restore and strengthen the Obama-era rule while industry is arguing for retaining the Trump rule.
OSHA plans to make a heat-illness standard one of its top priorities early in the Biden administration, touting California’s heat standard as a potential model and warning that without a new federal rule, Trump-era judicial precedent will block use of the OSH Act’s general duty clause to combat heat dangers.
OSHA will publish its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) in the June 21 Federal Register, making the rule effective for the healthcare sector upon publication, meaning the 14-day compliance deadline for most of its provisions will arrive on July 5.