The federal response to Covid-19 has worsened the Trump Administration’s “total abdication” of its responsibility to protect American workers, says a new AFL-CIO study.
There were at least 342,050 Covid-19 workplace infections and 1,893 deaths between March 31 and September 24 among nursing home, health care, corrections, and meatpacking, food-processing and farming industry employees, according to the labor group’s 29th annual “Death on the Job” survey.
“Swift public health and workplace safety standards could have prevented many of these deaths,” contend the authors.
The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been totally lax in its statutory enforcement responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, charges the AFL-CIO.
During the pandemic, the Centers for Disease Control has issued Covid-19 workplace safety guidelines but they’re vague and the CDC has not issued requirements, the authors go on to say.
They note workplace outbreak and worker infection information is limited because there is no comprehensive national surveillance system to collect case information by industry and occupation, other reporting is not mandatory and because testing is limited.
OSHA has taken the position it has all the tools needed to ensure employers are maintaining safe working conditions during the pandemic; however, it has investigated few complaints and issued fewer citations, says the report.
In the report, the AFL-CIO calls upon OSHA to immediately issue an emergency standard to protect workers from COVID-19.
The study attacks the Trump Administration’s Covid-19 workplace response as the latest in a series of efforts to delay and repeal job safety and other rules, and proposing deep cuts in the budget, and the elimination of worker safety and health training and other programs as part of his deregulatory agenda.
It points out the number of OSHA inspectors is the lowest since the early 1970s, when the agency was brand new.
“There is one inspector for every 83,207 workers. The current OSHA budget amounts to $3.54 for each worker,” the AFL-CIO study says.
Federal OSHA has enough inspectors to inspect each workplace once only 162 years, while the roughly half of the states that carryout workplace safety oversight themselves have enough for an inspection once every 107 years.
Taking specific aim at an alleged Trump Administration sin of omission, the AFL-CIO criticized the White House for sidelining an OSHA workplace violence standard. Currently, none exist.
“Workplace violence is a growing and serious threat—particularly for women workers, and workers in health care and social services. Congress should enact legislation to make sure this is done,” the study says.
The authors say Congress has taken positive steps in workplace safety by rejecting cuts President Trump proposed for coal mine enforcement; eliminating OSHA’s worker safety and health training program and the Chemical Safety Board; and slashing the NIOSH job safety research budget by more than 40 percent in Fiscal 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.
To see the entire 246-page report, click on:
