OSHA Leaves Millions of Essential Workers Out of Coronavirus Saftey Procedures

Even though the Occupational Safety Health Administration (OSHA) has been flooded with complaints related to the coronavirus pandemic in recent weeks, the federal agency responsible for enforcing workplace protections has established a series of protocols that have rolled back safety standards while essentially eliminating non-healthcare workers from being able to qualify for protections from the OSHA.

As of April 3rd, according to records obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request from OSHA, almost 4,000 working class Americans from across the United States have flooded OSHA with concerns that their employers haven’t done enough to protect them from the coronavirus pandemic.

About 27% of the complaints made to OSHA came from frontline workers in the health care industry providing direct care to coronavirus patients. But a whopping number of the complaints made came from 72% of employees outside of the healthcare industry, with large quantities from manufacturing and retail workers.

According to OSHA’s own documents, over  the past two weeks OSHA and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) have issued a series of guidelines that weaken protections for non-medical front-line workers. For example, the CDC released guidelines on April 8th that non-medical essential workers who’ve been exposed to the coronavirus could return to work as long as they’re wearing a mask and don’t exhibit symptoms, while medical workers who’ve been exposed have been advised to self-quarantine for 14 days. These recommendations sound even more ridiculous when you find out that just three days earlier Dr. Anthony Fauci stated that 25% to 50% of the people infected with coronavirus may be asymptomatic.

These recommendations were followed by directives last Friday which stated that the agency announced it would not require employers outside health care, emergency response or corrections to investigate whether coronavirus cases among employees resulted in the workplace unless multiple people in the same workplace get sick.

To make matters worse for non-medical essential workers, on Monday OSHA issued an enforcement directive in which it detailed its approach to handling coronavirus complaints in which it heavily prioritizes medical workers over all other essential workers.

According to David Michaels, former OSHA Director during the Obama Administration has started,

“It totally excludes everybody but health care...Everyone else is told that there is nothing that OSHA could do.”

But some, like Ed Foulke who oversaw OSHA during the Bush Administration believe that the agency is correct to establish priorities under circumstances such as these. Foulke has stated,

“This is an unprecedented event and the reasonable approach is to say, ‘Where is the greatest need?’”

One would assume that if the United States Government is able to guarantee that Wall St. gets bailed out with trillions of dollars every few years that they would also be able to ensure that all essential workers are protected during this pandemic, regardless of what sector of the economy they’re working in.

Unfortunately, due to the hijacking of our political process by corporate interests, our political leaders don’t see taking care of working class Americans as a priority of theirs. They’d much rather bailout their big money donors every few years.