Opinion | Essential Workers Deserve Better Protection From OSHA - The New York Times

‘You’re On Your Own,’ Essential Workers Are Being Told

Workplace safety is now a matter of public health.

By The Editorial Board

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

"Workplace safety is now a matter of public health.

The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.

A Walgreens employee inside a store in Manhattan.

Shelter-in-place orders are an effective means to slowing the spread of the coronavirus, yet millions of Americans have no choice but to leave home to go to work every day. Deemed essential for their jobs in manufacturing, grocery stores, pharmacies, warehouses, retailing and restaurants, they face daily risks by working alongside colleagues and customers who may be carriers of the coronavirus.

At grocery stores and sprawling warehouses, workers say not enough is being done to protect them from exposure. Walmart employees, for instance, say they lack sufficient sanitizing supplies and protective gear and are forced to congregate in spaces that put them well within a six-foot radius of co-workers. At meat processing plants, where production lines often require working shoulder to shoulder, the risks are particularly acute. And mass-transit workers say they haven’t been provided masks or personal cleaning supplies.

When their shifts end, they go home to their families, putting more people at risk.

Weeks into the pandemic, it’s apparent that not nearly enough is being done to protect these front-line workers, even as their continued labor ensures that a semblance of normality endures for their fellow Americans.

The Department of Labor’s primary worker safety enforcement arm, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, has taken a largely hands-off approach to the pandemic. Only last week did OSHA put a priority on investigating health care facilities for complaints about coronavirus safety procedures, while effectively giving a free pass to some of the nation’s largest employers. Without a clear set of rules to follow, employers are making them up as they go.

“As long as OSHA doesn’t take a position, these employers have a pass to say workers got sick elsewhere and it’s not their responsibility,” said Marc Perrone, international president of the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents some 1.3 million laborers.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued sensible guidelines on the federal level that can protect workers, such as standards for social distancing, sanitizing stations and using masks in the workplace. But OSHA hasn’t made the guidelines mandatory for workplaces — the C.D.C. itself doesn’t enforce them —  nor has OSHA adopted other new rules that could help ensure worker safety during the pandemic. It should do so now. Requiring businesses to follow the C.D.C.’s guidelines would allow OSHA to enforce them with inspections and fines.

Instead, a patchwork of rules — led primarily by governors in New York, Washington State and California — serve as an unsatisfactory substitute by mandating masks in all public settings and the use of other protective measures. But these haven’t been aimed specifically at workplaces, many of which need more guidance.

OSHA said its prior rules for worker safety apply during the pandemic, though the agency last week did give agents leeway to investigate coronavirus claims so long as they were confined to health care facilities and met certain other criteria. In a statement to The New York Times, OSHA said that “employers are, and will continue to be, responsible for providing a safe and healthy workplace” and that it can respond to formal complaints where a worker is killed or seriously injured on the job, known as the General Duty clause. The agency’s Covid-19 guidance for employers, however, acknowledges upfront it “is not a standard or regulation, and it creates no new legal obligations.”

In the meantime, OSHA offices are fielding thousands of coronavirus complaints but don’t have the wherewithal to investigate them. In Oregon alone, by early this month the local OSHA office had received 2,747 complaints about workplace conditions but had issued zero citations, the top local administrator told The Portland Tribune. An OSHA official in Illinois wrote in an email to a local union that, though she had been receiving daily complaints for weeks, “these recommended measures are not enforceable by OSHA since they are guidance and not OSHA law.” OSHA also told a lawyer representing an Illinois Walmart worker who died after contracting the coronavirus that “OSHA does not have any jurisdiction on enforcing anything related to Covid-19 at this time,” according to The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

As part of an advisory last week, OSHA indicated companies should conduct their own investigations and report back to the agency.

“The message from OSHA to employers and their workers is: You’re on your own,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA official and now program director of the National Employment Law Project.

That means a formal complaint lodged with the agency’s California division, known as Cal/OSHA, by Amazon warehouse workers in Eastvale, Calif., last week isn’t likely to result in an inspection, let alone a penalty or reform, she said. Workers there allege that, in Amazon’s rush to get customers their essential goods, they have had to work well within six feet of one another and aren’t given sufficient time or materials to sanitize their hands or their workstations. Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, said the company was working on expanding testing capacity for its hundreds of thousands of workers and called for regular universal testing to arrest the virus’s spread.

OSHA also can and should go beyond C.D.C. guidelines to require measures such as staggered shifts and lunch breaks and construction of barriers to protect employees in jobs like manufacturing and meatpacking that require close quarters. And it should carefully evaluate updated C.D.C. guidelines that permit employers to bring some workers back to the job after potential Covid-19 exposure before a two-week quarantine. Some say the new policy, meant to keep essential businesses running, risks re-exposing workers. Minnesota’s Department of Health, by contrast, has maintained a recommendation for a 14-day quarantine for workers after exposure.

OSHA has precedent on its side for tougher rules. During the H1N1 flu outbreak, it made C.D.C. rules enforceable, requiring the use of face masks and other measures to slow transmission. It has failed to act so far this time, however.

Companies may say new rules would be onerous and expensive, but the cost of prolonging the coronavirus’s spread can be far more costly: Smithfield Foods was forced to indefinitely close its Sioux Falls, S.D., plant — responsible for roughly 5 percent of the country’s pork production — after it failed to impose safety measures even as hundreds of its workers contracted the virus. The retailer Gap Inc., by contrast, told customers this month to expect slower delivery times after voluntarily following C.D.C. guidelines.

OSHA has taken steps to protect health care workers by prioritizing inspections of hospitals and other “high risk” facilities. But during the pandemic, warehouses and slaughterhouses, city buses and grocery stores have become high-risk facilities, too. If the spread of the disease is to slow, millions of workers deserve far better protection."

Opinion | Essential Workers Deserve Better Protection From OSHA - The New York Times