Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
OSHA’s challenge on COVID-19 rules
President Joe Biden this month ordered all employers with 100 or more workers to require vaccinations or weekly tests. The rule, which will cover about 80 million workers at private companies, must be written by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The Associated Press spoke about it with David Michaels, an epidemiologist who ran OSHA for seven years during the Obama administration and is now a professor of public health at George Washington University.
Describe the challenge OSHA faces as it tries to write a rule to protect workers from COVID-19 in a politically polarized environment?
In some ways, other OSHA rules are very similar to this. OSHA has rules that say: If you’re in the workplace, the employer has to make sure that silica or asbestos is controlled or that you’re given full protection if you’re up on the roof. The hazard in this case is the infectious worker. This rule will tell employers: You have to take steps to make sure potentially infectious workers don’t come into the workplace. You could do that by finding out if they’re fully vaccinated or have been tested recently and found to be negative. Or they can telework. But they can’t come into your workplace and spread the virus.
What are the biggest challenges in writing a rule like this? And what are the kinds of questions that businesses are going to have that OHSA needs to answer?
Questions like: What does it mean to be fully vaccinated? Which vaccines are acceptable and which ones aren’t? What tests will be acceptable? Who’s going to pay for testing?
Of course, we haven’t had a pandemic like this in well over a century. So it's a new situation. But I think OSHA is up for the challenge. And now with the support of President Biden, it will put pedal to the metal to get this out.
How will OSHA enforce the rule?
Most employers will voluntarily meet the standard because that’s what they do with all OSHA rules. Large employers in particular — they have H.R. teams, they have attorneys who tell them, this is what the law says and this is what we have to do. There will be some employers who don’t comply. Workers at those facilities can call OSHA, and you can send an inspector and they can issue a fine. And if it’s a willful violation, the fine can be very large. I think most employers are going to do the right thing, and we’ll see very high levels of compliance pretty quickly.
What do you think of the rule?
President Biden’s direction to OSHA is a very good first step. But we need more. There’s no reason this rule should be limited to employers with more than 100 employees. Workers at small employers are just as much at risk. Until we stop losing hundreds of people every day to this disease, we’ll never get back to any sort of normalcy.