Quite early in my career as a lawyer for the U.S. Labor Department — at the dawn of the Reagan presidency — I found myself trying a number of safety and health cases against a large South Carolina construction company. The Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act) had been signed into law by President Richard Nixon a decade earlier, but this company, as a matter of principle, contested even minor OSHA violations it received, regardless of their merits. The company, as I recall, just couldn’t stomach that the federal government had the audacity —and the authority — to demand that it protect its workers from hazards in the workplace. Those early memories resonate today.
Passed in 1970, the OSH Act was designed to “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women” by, among other things, “authorizing the enforcement of the standards developed under the Act.” Since its passage, this law — imperfect as it is — has saved the lives of countless workers in the United States. Far too many employees are still injured or die due to hazards on the job, but the OSH Act has made many millions of them safer and healthier.
Enter COVID-19. We saw “essential workers” — bus drivers, nurses, grocery store clerks, meatpacking plant workers — exposed to and dying from the virus. Under President Donald Trump
President Biden
Fast forward to today. Vaccination rates aren’t where they need to be, and the delta variant is ravaging our communities. In early September, a majority of United States counties were experiencing “extremely high” COVID-19 transmission, which translates into extremely high risk for unvaccinated people in…
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