To enforce President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate, the U.S. Department of Labor is going to need a lot of help. Your US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have enough safety inspectors to do the job.
So the government will depend on a body of informants to identify the violations: the employees themselves, who will presumably be concerned enough to report to their employers if their co-workers do not get vaccinated or do not undergo weekly tests to show that they are virus free.
What is unknown is how many employees will be willing to accept some risk, both to themselves and to their job security, in exchange for reporting their own employers. Without them, however, experts say it would be more difficult for the government to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions of workers in companies with 100 or more employees to be fully vaccinated by January 4 or to be tested weekly and wear a mask. at work.
“There is not an army of OSHA inspectors who can knock on employers’ doors or even call them on the phone,” explained Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a member of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and Poor Workers from Georgetown University. “They will depend on the workers and their union representatives to file complaints when the company is totally disobeying the law,” he added.
Jim Frederick, OSHA’s acting chief, told reporters that the agency will focus on the places “where workers need help to have a safe and healthy workplace.”
“Usually that comes in the form of a complaint,” added Frederick.
Critics warn that whistleblowers have often faced retaliation from their employers and that OSHA has offered little protection when they do.
The new mandate, which Biden announced last week, is the federal government’s most far-reaching step to push more Americans to receive a vaccine that has been widely available since early spring. The mandate will cover some 84 million employees.
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