OSHA Grants Temporary, Good Faith Relief From Reporting Requirements

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) announced that employers who are unable to fulfill annual testing, inspection, training, and auditing due to the COVID-19 outbreak will be granted relief as long as the company makes good faith efforts to stay in compliance. OSHA will evaluate “whether the employer made good faith efforts to comply with applicable OSHA standards and, in situations where compliance was not possible, to ensure that employees were not exposed to hazards from tasks, processes or equipment for which they were not prepared or trained.” The enforcement memorandum is here.

OSHA also has released an alert listing safety tips that employers can follow to help protect manufacturing workers from exposure to COVID-19. That announcement followed the issuance of OSHA guidance for the package delivery workforce and regarding preparing worksites for COVID-19. These alerts, guidance materials, and other OSHA resources relating to COVID-19 can be found here.

To help businesses the recent guidance issued by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration and in coordination with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Chamber has created a summary outlining what employers need to know about protecting their workers as they maintain or resume operations in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. The summary describes OSHA’s comments and addresses three of the main questions:

• How should employers protect their employees?
• Do employers have to record cases of COVID-19 on their injury logs?
• How will OSHA conduct enforcement related to Coronavirus?

Click here to view the summary.