The Department of Labor said in a report that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security failed to “take advantage of opportunities for cooperation with external agencies” to maintain workplace safety in high-risk industries in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
The report from DOL’s Office of Inspector General, which was released on Tuesday, said that OSHA received 15% more complaints in 2020 than 2019, and carried out 50% fewer inspections. “This meant that employees were left vulnerable to covid-19 as a danger in the workplace,” the report states.
“Such employees worked in industries with some of the highest risks of covid-19 exposure, including meat processing plants, nursing homes, hospitals, grocery stores, restaurants, department stores and penitentiary institutions. More than 1
million mission-critical workers became infected with covid-19 and survived in some cases. not ”, the report states.The OIG stated that “OSHA had not cooperated with the executives or regulators of external federal agencies to help protect mission-critical U.S. workers during the covid-19 pandemic” and “did not cooperate to encourage referrals of potential safety and health risks to covid-19 from external federal government personnel active in high-risk covid-19 exposure industries. “
The report noted that such high-risk industries have personnel on site from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service; Department of Health and Human Services Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services; and the Department of Justice Prison Bureau.
“OSHA saw the cooperation with these external authorities as separate from its oversight capacity, rather than as a way to improve its compliance,” the report noted, adding that the lack of coordination occurred when OSHA’s oversight team “already had a historically low number of inspectors.”
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