Biden’s Muzzle Terror for the Unvaxxed to Rely on Snitches and Covid Karens

Editor’s note: Americans will face a test. A test to see if they are a snitch nation or not. Tens of millions will be invited to denounce their boss and coworkers to the Vaccine NKVD. Will they take the bait?

To enforce President Joe Biden’s new COVID-19 vaccine regulation, the Labor Department is going to need a lot of help. Yet its Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) doesn’t have nearly enough workplace safety inspectors to do the job.

The 490-page regulation will cover American businesses with at least 100 workers, or about 84 million employees in all. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free.

What’s not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or their job security — for blowing the whistle [LOL. So that is what writing a denunciation for the NKVD called now.] on their own employers. Without them, though, experts say the government would find it harder to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions of workers at large businesses to be fully vaccinated by January 4 or be tested weekly and wear a mask on the job.

“No army” of inspectors

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers door or even calling them,” said Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA chief of staff who is a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor. “They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law.”

Under the regulation, businesses must maintain records on workers’ vaccination statuses. But for workplaces where employees aren’t required to be vaccinated, workers will need to get weekly tests and wear masks.

OSHA said it plans to check on compliance with the latter by doing spot-checks of businesses, and will also rely on complaints the agency receives about businesses that aren’t following the regulation.

“We will have our staff available and responsive to complaints, which is a No. 1 way we hear about problems in a workplace,” said Jim Frederick, the acting chief of OSHA, on a conference call with reporters. He also said the agency will focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

“That typically comes through in the form of a complaint,” Frederick added.

Enforcement challenges

Should the regulation survive its legal challenges, though, the task of enforcing it would fall on OSHA, the small Labor Department agency that was established 50 years ago to police workplace safety and protect workers from such dangers as toxic chemicals, rickety ladders and cave-ins at construction sites.

OSHA has jurisdiction in 29 states. Other states, including California and Michigan, have their own federally approved workplace safety agencies. These states will have an additional month — until early February — to adopt their own version of the COVID-19 rule, equal to or tougher than OSHA’s.

For a task as enormous as enforcing the new vaccine order, OSHA and its state “partners” are stretched thin. Just 1,850 inspectors will oversee 130 million workers at 8 million job sites. So the agencies must rely on whistleblowers.

“They have inspectors but they don’t have enough to do extensive pre-emptive investigations of employers,” said Julie Vanneman, an attorney with Dentons Cohen & Grigsby, where she works on environmental and health and safety matters. “However, OSHA tends to respond quite throughly to whistleblower complaints.”

OSHA urges workers to first bring unsafe or unhealthy working conditions to the attention of their employers “if possible.” Employees could also file a confidential safety complaint with OSHA or have a case filed by a representative, such as a lawyer, a union representative or a member of the clergy. But they have no right to sue their employer in court for federal safety violations.

Source: Associated Press