Virginia’s workplace safety council voted Monday to repeal the state’s emergency rules protecting workers from Covid-19, requiring employers to follow looser guidelines to prevent the spread of the coronavirus in the workplace.
Virginia, which has its own workplace safety agency, was the first state in the country to introduce emergency standards to protect workers from the virus. Those standards, issued in July 2020 under Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, required employers to require indoor masks in higher-risk areas and report Covid outbreaks to the state’s Department of Health.
The current governor, Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, ordered the state health board to reevaluate the standards earlier this year, arguing they were a burden on business.
“The Virginia Covid-19 permanent standard has fallen out of line with current CDC guidelines and with what many other states were doing to address the current state of the pandemic,” said Nathaniel M. Glasser, an attorney at Epstein Becker & green. , which specializes in Covid-19 and labor law, adding that nothing prevents employers from going beyond state guidelines.
The rules will be replaced by guidelines for employers that recommend promoting vaccination, encouraging employees with symptoms to stay at home and requiring people infected with the coronavirus not to come to work.
Governor Youngkin said in a statement that “It is undeniable that Virginia is open for business.” Virginia AFL-CIO president Doris Crouse-Mays said the state had chosen to give up security protections for working people and that the Covid-19 crisis is still a pandemic.
States with their own workplace safety agencies must have rules at least as effective as those of the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration. OSHA under President Biden tried to enact a sweeping rule requiring Covid vaccines or regular testing for about 84 million American workers. But the rule was repealed in January after it was blocked by the Supreme Court, forcing workers and their employers across the country to face a patchwork of state and local regulations.
