By Lulit Shewan 

In July, the Department of Labor (DOL) introduced an extensive plan to reduce regulations affecting various labor protections, including important workplace safety regulations. Officials presented the initiative as an effort to “put American workers and job creators first,” a misleading interpretation of policies that enable employers to jeopardize their workers’ well-being and complicate the process for employees to seek accountability. 

This movement toward deregulation indicates a readiness to compromise the health and lives of workers, especially Black and brown workers who are overrepresented in the blue-collar industries that would be impacted, in pursuit of corporate profits. If approved, the far-reaching changes will adversely affect working conditions at construction sites and mines and limit the ability of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to penalize employers if workers are injured or killed while performing inherently dangerous activities.   

Loosening regulations that ensure health, safety, and dignity in the workplace will not eliminate outdated or unnecessary regulations. Rather, this plan undermines the fundamental right of employees to have safe and respectable working environments; indicates to employers that taking shortcuts is permissible and that the government will ignore the exploitation and subsequent dismissal of worker safety; and seems aimed at reducing expenses for employers by transferring risks and dangers onto employees. 

The Importance of Regulatory Rules 

Agencies draft federal rules to implement the specifics of legislation enacted by Congress. Regulations ensure that laws are properly implemented and administered so that workers have meaningful protections. This is especially important given that current labor law already falls short in creating adequate job quality standards. Trump’s deregulatory agenda requires agencies to identify ten regulations to repeal before enacting a single new regulation. This paradigm upholds the false notion that regulations hinder economic growth and burden employers. 

Over half of the rules that Trump’s DOL wants to repeal are intended to make workplaces safer for employees. Since the establishment of OSHA, more than 712,000 workers have been saved under the OSH Act, and jobsite deaths have decreased by almost two-thirds, even as the size of the U.S. workforce has more than doubled. OSHA is the only agency that enforces and preserves worker health and safety. 

Health and Safety Deregulations 

Within this deregulation campaign, DOL intends to revise reporting thresholds and training mandates, and change enforcement priorities and inspection frequencies at OSHA. The  twenty-five proposed rules all put worker safety protections at risk. Four of the most concerning are: 

General Duty Clause 

A proposed change that would limit OSHA’s ability to cite employers under the General Duty Clause for hazards deemed “inherent and inseparable” from certain professions in high-risk sectors is particularly harmful. Employers already have autonomy over what is “essential” to a job and how to establish workplace standards, especially in nonunionized settings. That makes the General Duty Clause one of OSHA’s most effective enforcement weapons to address the countless dangers workers may face, giving it the authority to address significant workplace dangers that are not covered by more focused rules. Without the clause’s vital safeguards, OSHA would be significantly less equipped to respond to developing risks or hold employers accountable for recognized hazards that lie within gaps in current regulations.

COVID-19 Reporting 

The administration also intends to terminate OSHA’s independent system for monitoring COVID-related deaths and hospitalizations, as well as explicitly remove COVID-19 emergency reporting guidelines for health care settings from federal regulations. This change would mean that employers must only report the usual criteria for workplace risks, under which companies are only required to record hospitalizations if they occur within 24 hours of the job exposure. Since most COVID-related hospitalizations occur days or even weeks after exposure, returning to OSHA’s baseline reporting standard would essentially remove many workplace-related COVID cases from the record. The elimination of separate COVID-19 reporting also signals a concerning de-prioritization of reporting on the exposure of contagious illnesses, even in medical facilities where reporting is crucial for maintaining the safety of those settings, safeguarding access to care, and averting outbreaks that disproportionately affect those who are already at risk. If implemented, this change will harm workers in nursing facilities, assisted living communities, and home health agencies, as well as in other health care environments such as hospitals and medical offices. 

Musculoskeletal Injury Reporting

Another proposal would remove the need for employers to disclose musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), even though these injuries are among the most prevalent and expensive workplace hazards. MSDs are injuries brought on by or made worse by heavy lifting, repetitive motions, poor workplace ergonomics, and other physically taxing jobs that are often not adequately protected by existing OSHA standards. Not