MDlaxfan76 wrote: ↑Fri Nov 12, 2021 1:09 am
kramerica.inc wrote: ↑Thu Nov 11, 2021 7:45 pm
Our company bumped everyone back to Jan 4th.
Found this tidbit in Newsweek today:
Constitutional accountability is coming for the Biden administration's COVID-19 "emergency temporary standard" (ETS)—better known as Biden's vaccine mandate. The rule, which would require businesses with more than 100 employees to enforce vaccination or weekly testing starting January 4, has run into a maelstrom of legal and political opposition.
Since the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) published the final ETS last Friday, at least 27 states and countless private plaintiffs from around the country filed lawsuits. If history is any guide, OSHA now faces an uphill climb to defend the rule. The agency is relying on the "emergency" authority that allows it to bypass normal procedural safeguards, but that courts have reviewed with a jaundiced eye. Of OSHA's nine previous uses of this authority, six were challenged in court and only one was fully upheld.
Certainly reasonable, what's the count up to now at your company Kram?...we're at 100% and have been since May. Boosters are on the docket next.
OSHA is required to take action if it sees serious risk to workers, but that doesn't mean they have much capacity to actually enforce the rules.
For instance, it's not as if OSHA can check every site where a hard hat is required to see if they're compliant. But what it does do is create a situation in which a whistle blower can bring OSHA in, or more relevantly can show that the employer wasn't following OSHA guidelines and injury resulted from that non-compliance. Liability.
And for those employers which actually want to comply, it provides a cover umbrella for insistence upon workers following OSHA rules.
But if a business does a fairly reasonable job of getting their people to get vaccinated or get tested and someone slips through a bit, not going to find OSHA swooping in to nail them. But there's some real liability if the employer decides to not require employees to do either, or even more flagrantly declares this non-compliance. And then someone dies...hoo boy, I don't want to be that employer.
Where I think the rule is weak, and may be best challenged legally, is that there's inadequate differentiation between work environments. A meat packing plant, for instance, is a way different environment than climbing a telephone pole. The cut-off at 100 employees, while intended to cut some slack on smaller employers, doesn't address the situation in which an employer has 50 workers congregated tightly in a poorly ventilated building...versus a larger company that does outdoors landscaping.
Here's the thing. It would be best for public health (and taxpayer expense) if everyone got vaccinated unless they had a very real medical issue that obviated against vaccination. And for those who have high exposure situations, it would be best if they were tested frequently as they could well be carriers, whether vaccinated or not. And it would be best if people wore masks in high congregation, poor ventilation areas...at least while there's significant prevalence of the virus in that area.
But how best to get folks to do these things?
I'm in favor of mandates, but rather than work related (other than risk of spread mitigation), I"d prefer to use access to things we'd like to do, but don't actually have to do.
