Litigation

Legal scrutiny of OSHA’s pending vaccine mandate is ramping up, as Arizona’s attorney general has filed what appears to be the first suit to block the rule while unions that challenged the agency’s earlier COVID-19 standard for the healthcare sector are suspending that suit to consider how the agency’s new policy will affect it.

Republican governors are vowing to oppose President Joe Biden’s newly announced plan for OSHA to mandate strict COVID-19 vaccination requirements for private-sector employers, threatening court challenges and executive orders aimed at blocking any workplace vaccine requirement.

A new Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) raises the already-high bar OSHA must clear to cite employers for a willful violation of its noise exposure standard, holding that the agency must go beyond showing that an employer had a heightened awareness of the standard.

OSHA has updated its COVID-19 guidance to recommend face coverings for workers at indoor work sites in areas with “substantial or high transmission” of the disease regardless of vaccination status, based on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) new guide aimed at stemming the more-contagious “Delta” coronavirus variant.

Over the objections of labor unions and other groups, a federal appellate court has granted Biden administration requests to remand Trump-era evaluations of the flame retardant cluster known as HBCD as well as the solvent 1,4-dioxane, clearing the way for officials to redo the analyses without necessarily addressing petitioners’ legal claims.

The Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission (OSHRC) has struck down OSHA’s citation against a New Jersey construction company for a 2017 accident that the agency claimed violated lockout/tagout requirements in its construction safety standard, taking a narrow view of the “maintenance” work that triggers those provisions.

Amazon and workers suing the online retailer over COVID-19 infection dangers are sparring in appellate court over whether regulators’ withdrawals of pandemic orders and workplace safety guidance based on the success of vaccinations have rendered moot pending litigation over employers’ alleged failure to comply with those mandates.

Labor unions intend to ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to order OSHA to expand its healthcare-specific COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) to either all employers or specifically to the meatpacking and food-processing sectors, according to a new court filing.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has granted EPA’s request to remand without vacatur the Trump-era risk evaluation of methylene chloride, rejecting objections from unions, states and environmental groups that the agency’s plan to rework its analysis of the toxic solvent will not address several elements they claim are unlawful.

The labor union National Nurses United (NNU) has dropped its court challenge to OSHA’s COVID-19 emergency temporary standard (ETS) without explanation, leaving a challenge by the AFL-CIO and United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW) as apparently the only active litigation over the medical-sector rule.