State Actions

Michigan’s state workplace safety agency is targeting its COVID-19 enforcement on retail businesses through an “emphasis program” focused primarily on restaurants with grocery stores, gas stations, and convenience stores as secondary priorities, and applying the state’s existing safety rules rather than issuing a pandemic-specific standard.

Oregon officials say their recently proposed COVID-19 workplace safety standard is largely designed to “formalize and standardize” pandemic employee protection guidance from OSHA and other agencies while adding specific requirements for social distancing, medical removal and infection-control planning.

California’s OSHA (Cal/OSHA) standards board staff is recommending that the board deny a recent petition from labor groups to adopt a COVID-19-specific emergency temporary standard (ETS) to further protect employees from the virus, concluding that enforcement of comprehensive existing regulations is the best path forward.

An official with the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry (DOLI) says the state’s novel emergency temporary standard (ETS) for COVID-19 that could be a model for other states focuses largely on mandatory infection control plans for all workplaces that carry at least a “medium” infection risk.

Employer representatives are objecting to differences between California OSHA’s requirements for companies to record and report COVID-19 cases among employees and federal OSHA requirements, and urging the state to align its rules more closely with OSHA -- but California appears to be broadly rejecting the request.

Virginia has approved its first-in-the-nation workplace standard for COVID-19 protections in a marker for other states weighing similar rules in response to OSHA’s refusal to craft a nationwide policy, even as congressional Democrats are renewing their push to force the agency to pursue a rulemaking in the next stimulus bill.

Congress’ supplemental $7.8 billion funding bill to tackle the spread of the coronavirus includes $10 million for the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to pursue worker-based training to prevent and reduce exposures to the virus of hospital employees, emergency first responders, and other workers at risk.

The California Chamber of Commerce is warning employers that state regulators are poised to adopt likely expensive and burdensome new worker safety regulations in the coming year, including tighter lead-exposure standards, more stringent wildfire smoke protections, and first-time indoor heat protection measures.

OSHA, EPA and other state and federal agencies are taking steps to protect healthcare and other workers against potential exposure from the deadly coronavirus, including OSHA’s suggestion that some existing standards might apply to preventing occupational exposure and EPA issuing guidance on using disinfectants to help limit the spread of diseases.

The California OSHA’s (Cal/OSHA) standards board has approved new rules requiring employers to give workers injury and illness prevention program documents within five days upon request, over industry objections that compliance could be difficult and calls from farmworkers and labor unions to expand and strengthen the rules.