The federal agency responsible for ensuring on-the-job safety announced Friday that it will re-examine several coronavirus-related investigations that were done during the Trump administration, Reuters reports.
The effort will look into whether the employers practiced correct safety guidelines during the pandemic, or if workers who got sick with the virus were unduly exposed on the job. It goes to a wider agency directive to hold employers accountable for increasing risk of exposure to the coronavirus, as well as those companies that retaliate against employees who reported risks to regulators.
One such case was an outbreak of coronavirus at a UPS distribution center in Arizona. A manager died of the illness, but company officials failed to implement sufficient safety precautions because, they said, it wasn’t certain the employees got the virus at work.
OSHA officials said inspectors will prioritize industries including healthcare, meat packing, grocery stores, restaurants and prisons, where workers are frequently in close contact with others. These types of industries have also proven to frequently be hotspots for outbreaks, not just within a company but further within the surrounding community.
Biden appointee James Frederick, currently the acting head of OSHA, said the aim is to “truly focus on workers with the biggest need for assistance. OSHA has limited resources, and we want to utilize them the best we can.”
Frederick said the agency will undertake 1,600 inspections in the next year, some of which will be revisiting locations where investigations were requested or conducted during the Trump Administration.