OSHA slammed for lax regulation

Small fines, slow response to pleas drawing criticism

When the pandemic hit in March, a JBS meatpacking plant in Greeley, began providing paid leave to workers at high risk of serious illness.

But last month, shortly after the plant was cited by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration for a serious virusrelated safety violation and given two initial penalties totaling about $ 15,500, it brought the highrisk employees back to work.

“Now the company knows where the ceiling is,” said Kim Cordova, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union local that represents the workers, about half a dozen of whom have died of COVID- 19. “If other workers die, it’s not going to cost them that much.”

JBS USA said the return of the vulnerable workers in late September had nothing to do with the citation. “It was in response to the low number of COVID- 19 cases at the facility for a sustained period of time,” a spokesperson said, noting that the company began informing workers of the return in late July.

The JBS case reflects a skew in OSHA’s COVID- related citations, most of which it has announced since September: While the agency has announced initial penalties totaling more than $ 1 million to dozens of health care facilities and nursing homes, it has announced fines for only two meatpacking plants for a total of less than $ 30,000. JBS and the owner of the second plant, Smithfield Foods, combined to take in tens of billions of dollars worldwide last year.

The meat industry has gotten the relatively light touch even as the virus has infected thousands of its workers — including more than 1,500 at the two facilities in question — and dozens have died.

“The number of plants with outbreaks was enormous around the country,” said David Michaels, an epidemiologist who headed the agency in the Barack Obama administration and now teaches at the George Washington University School of Public Health. “But most OSHA offices haven’t yet issued any citations.”

The disparity in the way OSHA has treated health care and meatpacking is no accident. In April, the agency announced that it would largely avoid inspecting workplaces in person outside a small number of industries deemed most susceptible to coronavirus outbreaks, like health care, nursing homes and emer

gency response.

Experts concede that with limited resources for inspections, OSHA, part of the Labor Department, must set priorities according to risk. Some, like Michaels, argue that this makes it more important to issue a rule instructing employers on the steps they must take to keep workers safe. But the agency chose instead to issue a set of recommendations, like 6 feet of distance between workers on a meat- processing line.

A Labor Department spokesperson said OSHA already had more general rules that “apply to protecting workers from the coronavirus.”

Around the time of the recommendations, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring meatpacking plants “critical infrastructure” to help ensure that they remained open during the pandemic.

OSHA’s oversight of the meatpacking industry has been in the spotlight in a case filed by workers at a

Maid- Rite plant in Dunmore, Pa., accusing the agency of lax regulation.

The suit contended that OSHA had done little for weeks after a worker filed a complaint in April describing insufficient precautions amid an outbreak at the plant — and after other workers filed a complaint in May asserting that they faced “imminent danger” because of the risk of infection there.

When OSHA finds that conditions pose an “imminent danger” to workers, it typically intervenes quickly and asks the employer to mitigate the risk. But in a hearing before a federal judge in late July, a local OSHA official testified that she did not consider the term to be appropriate in the Maid- Rite case.

The official said that because OSHA’s central office had designated all meatpacking facilities to be “medium risk,” the agency would not rush to conduct a formal inspection absent some “outlying” issue. The OSHA area director said that of nearly 300 COVIDrelated complaints his office had received at the time, it had not deemed any an imminent danger.

The agency inspected the

Maid- Rite plant July 9, months after the initial complaint, finding that many workers were spaced 2 to 3 feet apart with no barriers separating them. A Labor Department lawyer said at the hearing that OSHA was still studying the feasibility of requiring the company to space them farther apart.

A Maid- Rite spokesperson said the company was following guidelines suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “as we have been since they were released.”

OSHA has also been accused by union officials and even company executives of having been slow to visit the two meatpacking facilities that it has cited so far.

Cordova sent the agency a letter March 23 asking it to conduct a spot check of the JBS plant and several other workplaces that her union represents. In response, she said, a local OSHA official told her that his office did not have capacity for inspections.

The agency eventually visited the 3,000- worker plant May 14, after the plant had closed amid an outbreak and then reopened, and several workers had died.