David Zalubowski/AP Photo
Carolina Sanchez is comforted by her son during a protest staged by the union representing employees at a Colorado meatpacking plant where six workers died of COVID-19 and hundreds more were infected, outside the offices of OSHA, September 16, 2020, in Denver.
With the U.S. death toll from COVID-19 rising relentlessly toward half a million, President Biden signed multiple executive orders today to slow its grim reaping. One of them required Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to enforce workplace safety rules to which it turned a blind eye during the Trump presidency and requested OSHA to develop enforceable safety standards to counter the pandemic’s spread in workplaces.
Under the leadership of Trump’s labor secretary, longtime anti-union attorney Eugene Scalia, OSHA considered the preservation of laissez-faire ideology to be more important than the preservation of American workers’ lives when confronted with businesses’ refusal to adopt pandemic safety standards. OSHA established no enforceable standards for such matters as the distancing between workers (which is why the virus spread like wildfire in meatpacking plants) and levied few serious fines on employers whose workers were subjected to COVID exposure. Its response to calls to investigate particular plants was similarly minimal. (In one reported instance, an OSHA field investigator declined to visit a plant where the workers were packed together because she feared exposure to the disease. The agency took no action on behalf of the endangered workers, however.)
In another action signaling he’s well aware of the challenges facing American workers, Biden fired National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Peter Robb yesterday. Robb’s tenure at the NLRB—the agency established during the New Deal to enable workers to form and join the unions of their choice—was marked by his consistent efforts to keep workers from joining unions and to keep unions from representing workers. Noticing this apparent contradiction between the NLRB’s mission and Robb’s own, Biden offered Robb the opportunity to resign—something that most Trump appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president already had done. Robb, however, was so zealous in his commitment to blocking workers’ wishes that he refused; I believe he may have been the only Trump official with a comparable appointment status to do so. At which point, Biden immediately showed him the door.
On the continuum of worker-friendly actions, dumping Robb and telling OSHA to do its job are low-hanging fruit. The speed with which Biden acted, however, was not just encouraging but a welcome break from the studied slowness which frequently marked other Democratic presidents’ approach to promoting workers’ interests. It’s a good beginning.
