Safety at workplace

During his campaign for the Presidency, Joe Biden called on President Donald Trump to: “Establish and enforce health and safety standards for workplaces… The Trump Administration should immediately release and enforce an Emergency Temporary Standard… to give employers and frontline employees specific, enforceable guidance on what to do to reduce the spread of COVID.”

Biden became president on January 20, 2021. On January 21, Biden ordered the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to create emergency COVID safety standards for workplaces by mid-March. And then… nothing, for months. Finally, in June, Biden’s OSHA announced that the agency would issue an emergency COVID workplace safety standard, but only for healthcare workers.

Other workers? Nothing.

This is “a betrayal of workers and worker safety,” said Jordan Barb, the Deputy Assistant of OSHA under President Barack Obama, as reported by Payday Report.

Congressman Bobby Scott (D-VA), chair of the House Education and Labor Committee, and the first Black person elected to Congress from Virginia since Reconstruction had this to say: “[The new standard] provides no meaningful protection to many workers who remain at high risk of serious illness from COVID-19. Workers in meat processing plants, prisons, homeless shelters, grocery stores, and many other workplaces will be forced to continue relying on voluntary safety guidance, which has failed to protect hundreds of thousands of workers and families from preventable infections throughout the pandemic… [F]ewer than half of Americans are currently fully vaccinated. With vaccination rates for Black and Brown people lagging far behind the overall population, the lack of a comprehensive workplace safety standard and the rapid reopening of the economy is a dangerous combination… [T]oday’s announcement is too little, too late for countless workers and families across the country.”

Trump was repeatedly accused of ignoring science, and basing his COVID policies on politics instead. Apparently, what was good for the goose is now also good for the gander. As journalists Walker Bragman and Andrew Perez write: “[I]t has become increasingly clear that the federal pandemic response framework developed under the Trump administration – where rules and regulations are left up to the states, and the White House bets everything on vaccines – has not fundamentally changed.”

Jordan Barb added: “An OSHA standard is kind of like a skunk at the garden party. The whole theme of the Biden administration regarding COVID, is that things are getting better, things are getting better quickly. The more the messaging turned optimistic, the more the message was that we’re pulling our way out of this. The harder it became then to actually issue a standard.”

This is the kind of pragmatic politics that led Biden in the past to get “tough on crime” and fan the flames of mass incarceration, or to vote in support of George W Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Excerpted: ‘Biden and Trump: No COVID-19 Safety Protocols for Workers’

Counterpunch.org