The Trump administration announced Friday afternoon that employers outside of the health care industry generally won’t be required to record coronavirus cases among their workers, a decision that left some workplace safety advocates incredulous.
COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, is classified as a recordable illness, meaning employers would have to notify the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when an employee gets sick from an exposure at work. But the nation’s top workplace safety agency now says the majority of U.S. employers won’t have to try to determine whether employees’ infections happened in the workplace unless it’s obvious.
“OSHA is kidding, right?” tweeted David Michaels, who helmed OSHA throughout the presidency of Barack Obama.
It is not a joke. OSHA, which is part of the Labor Department, released an enforcement memo Friday spelling out the recording rules.
Employers in health care, emergency response and corrections would have to inform the agency when they become aware of a COVID-19 case that probably resulted from work. But other entities would not have to do so unless there was “objective evidence” that the transmission was work-related, or there was evidence “reasonably available to the employer” ― for example, if a whole slew of people who work right next to each other got sick.
The rationale: Those employers outside of health care “may have difficulty making determinations about whether workers who contracted COVID-19 did so due to exposures at work,” the memo stated.
But if employers don’t have to try to figure out whether a transmission happened in the workplace, it could leave both them and the government in the dark about emerging hotspots in places like retail stores or meatpacking plants.
“So all you infected bus drivers, grocery store clerks, poultry processors ― you didn’t get it at work,” tweeted Jordan Barab, a former OSHA official now with the House Committee on Education and Labor.
The announcement is part of an ongoing fight between the Trump administration and occupational safety experts who say OSHA is failing to fulfill its obligations under the president. Employer record keeping has been a key issue in that spat. Early in his presidency, Donald Trump loosened the recording requirements employers must follow, a move critics said would make it easier for companies to fudge their data and hide their injuries.
