By Conn Maciel Carey LLP’s COVID-19 Task Force
OSHA’s COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing emergency temporary standard is expected to be released imminently, likely Wednesday or Thursday of this week.
OMB Has Concluded Its Review of the ETS:
This morning, OMB’s website updated again, but this time, it was not to add more EO 12866 stakeholder meetings to the calendar, it was to declare OMB’s review of the ETS “concluded.” Here are two screenshots from OMB’s website. The first shows the list of active DOL rulemakings at OMB for some form of review, and it identifies the status for the COVID-19 vaccination and testing ETS as “Concluded.”
The second one provides a little more detail, including these notes about the ETS: “Received Date: 10/12/2021” and “Concluded Date: 11/01/2021.”
The Dept. of Labor Gives Some Clues About What to Expect in the ETS:
Additionally, a Department of Labor spokesman shared this statement this morning:
“On November 1, the Office of Management and Budget completed its regulatory review of the emergency temporary standard. The Federal Register will publish the emergency temporary standard in the coming days. [OSHA] has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees, firm- or company-wide, and provides options for compliance…. Covered employers must develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, unless they adopt a policy requiring employees to choose either to get vaccinated or to undergo regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at work. The ETS also requires employers to provide paid time to workers to get vaccinated and paid sick leave to recover from any side effects.”
The DOL statement provides some useful insight about what will be in the final rule and when we will see it. First, OSHA did stick with the 100-employee threshold that the President identified in his announcement and new COVID-19 Action Plan from September 9th. There was always a chance that OSHA would scrapped that employee-count trigger as they wrote the rule and instead made it apply to everyone. We also see in this DOL statement that, as expected, the 100-employee count will be Continue reading