OSHA has published its first handbook for compliance officers to enforce the COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) just as the rule’s first wave of employer mandates are going into effect, with guidelines for both remote and in-person inspections at healthcare facilities as well as criteria for applying the rule’s site-specific exemptions.

OSHA has published its first handbook for compliance officers to enforce the COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) just as the rule’s first wave of employer mandates are going into effect, with guidelines for both remote and in-person inspections at healthcare facilities as well as criteria for applying the rule’s site-specific exemptions.

Four staff scientists at EPA’s chemical safety office are asking the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to review their claims of long-running “fraud and corruption” in the TSCA program, saying managers and political officials across multiple administrations intervened in a host of cases to ease chemical risk findings, workplace safety mandates and other aspects of their risk evaluations.

Four staff scientists at EPA’s chemical safety office are asking the Office of Inspector General (OIG) to review their claims of long-running “fraud and corruption” in the TSCA program, saying managers and political officials across multiple administrations intervened in a host of cases to ease chemical risk findings, workplace safety mandates and other aspects of their risk evaluations.

The Agriculture Department (USDA) has let pass the deadline for appealing or seeking a stay of a federal judge’s ruling that scrapped its line-speed waiver program for pork plants over worker safety concerns, reinstating stricter caps on production speeds even as several firms are seeking permission to file their own appeals.

EPA chemicals chief Michal Freedhoff says the agency could begin to finalize new versions of at least seven of the 10 chemical evaluations issued by the Trump administration starting in spring 2022, while three of the documents have been deemed “likely sufficient” in their current forms and will drive proposed management rules.

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.

Labor unions are suing the Biden OSHA over its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS), setting the stage for a ruling on whether regulators and the White House lawfully found that only medical workers face “grave danger” from the pandemic, just as newly released draft materials show officials originally sought an economy-wide ETS.

Labor unions are suing the Biden OSHA over its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS), setting the stage for a ruling on whether regulators and the White House lawfully found that only medical workers face “grave danger” from the pandemic, just as newly released draft materials show officials originally sought an economy-wide ETS.

Labor unions are suing the Biden OSHA over its COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS), setting the stage for a ruling on whether regulators and the White House lawfully found that only medical workers face “grave danger” from the pandemic, just as newly released draft materials show officials originally sought an economy-wide ETS.