Originally published on June 24, 2021, reposted with only the tiniest of edits. Notably, in recent months it seems that even many healthcare facilities in the US have by and large dispensed with masking or with any other form of COVID-19 protections. Given the insistence of the Biden White House that we must now learn to “live with” the epidemic, development or enforcement of any new COVID-19 workplace guidelines in the US appears to be highly unlikely for the visible future.
A couple of weeks ago, in a not at all unexpected development, the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration released its new COVID-19 mandatory safety rules. Generally speaking, the rules specify that employers are obligated to provide their workers with masks, social distancing, physical barriers, and proper ventilation…but only in the healthcare industry, in particular in hospitals, nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As for all other employers in the US, OSHA released an updated set of optional safety guidelines, but declined to mandate any safety protocols1. In this sense, the new OSHA rules complement, rather than contradict, the updated CDC guidelines on mask wearing by vaccinated persons, with both releases underscoring the predictably business-friendly character of the Biden administration.
Rather than rant and rail for an extended period on that last point, therapeutic though it may seem, permit me to list, by way of a CNBC article published in February of this year2, occupations that at least one study conducted in California identified as having experienced the highest mortality rates over the first seven months of the COVID-19 epidemic in the US. Specifically, these are:
- Cooks.
- Warehouse workers.
- Agricultural workers.
- Bakers.
- Construction workers.
Or, if one wishes to organise this list by type of employer: restaurants, Amazon and like retailers, agribusiness, food production facilities, and construction contractors. Scanning through the study itself3, it seems that only retail, government, and “non-essential” employees – in other words, all those people who could actually stay home or experienced reduced human interaction while at work – had excess mortality rates comparable to or lower than that experienced in the healthcare sector, whereas just about all other industries were rather worse off.
To be sure, the study is rather dated, it is limited in scope – to California, for one – and, at the time of the CNBC article, it was not peer-reviewed. On the other hand, its conclusions make empirical sense – those workers that have to actually show up in spite of any quarantine, and whose occupation does not, as with nurses and doctors, at least in theory provide them with specialised protective equipment, end up getting sick and dying more. And yet the Biden administration made a beeline for the healthcare sector while ignoring, and thus catering to the ownership of, every other one of the industries mentioned above.
It is, of course, quite possible that OSHA, the CDC or whatever other government agency can produce, has produced, might produce a study showing that, at present, workers at healthcare facilities assume the greatest risk, by far, relative to all other occupations. After all, in its press statement OSHA stressed that its decision was motivated strictly by science.
And yet, one cannot help feeling that, at the end of the day, the Biden administration simply wanted to do its donors among the socio-economic elite, nay, the socio-economic elite as a whole, a solid. Especially as the Democratic party as a whole has spent the last several decades skewing decidedly towards what one used to call petit bourgeoisie – small-time capitalists, restaurant owners, construction firms, that sort of thing. They, essentially, paired with racial minorities, constitute the party’s desired “voter base” – and so it makes perfect sense that the party’s policies would be geared first and foremost towards satisfying the priorities of this, relatively affluent class, and of its big business donors, of course.
As for the regular workers outside the healthcare sector? Well, they will just have to fend for themselves.
- For further details, and the reaction from labour unions, see Rainey, R., “New Covid workplace safety rules snag healthcare, spare other industries”, Politico, June 10, 2021, retrieved June 21, 2021.[↩]
- Stieg, C., “Line cooks have the highest risk of dying during the pandemic, plus other riskiest jobs: study”, CNBC, February 2, 2021, retrieved June 20, 2021.[↩]
- Available at https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.01.21.21250266v1.full.pdf, retrieved June 24, 2021.[↩]