Cal/OSHA's Oncoming Regulatory Avalanche

Bryan Little, Farm Employers Labor Service

March 29, 2023

Extreme snow levels in the Sierra Nevada mountains can create heightened avalanche risk for skiers and back-country travelers. It seems like the much-wished for wind-down of the COVID emergency may be having a similar impact at Cal/OSHA and the Standards Board.

At last week’s Cal/OSHA Standards Board meeting, and this week’s Cal/OSHA Advisory Committee, the agency announced upcoming milestones on regulatory initiatives that had been put on hold (in some cases for several years) as the agency and the board dealt with the COVID emergency:

• Indoor Heat Illness: this regulation has existed in draft form since 2017 and has been the topic of at least six stakeholder meetings and six distinct drafts. The last draft was released in 2019, which was also the date of the last (and most recent) draft of the regulation. The agency’s proposed regulation will be published on March 31, triggering a 45-day comment period ending with the Standards Board’s scheduled May meeting. The last draft from 2019 featured numerous problems, like the lack of an “off-switch” when the regulation would no longer be in effect in a particular workplace after having been triggered on by indoor temperatures exceeding 82⁰F, clear definitions as to how employers with indoor and outdoor operations are to distinguish applicability of the indoor reg with the existing, long-standing outdoor regulation (GISO 3395), and how employers are to monitor and manage multiple “indoor workplaces” found in cars, trucks, tractors and other vehicles driven by employees.
• Workplace Violence: based on an existing regulation designed to deal with violence experienced by healthcare workers particularly in mental health facilities, the proposed standard covering general industry would require employers to adopt a workplace violence prevention plan (not unlike other plans covering heat illness, COVID prevention and other written plan requirements like Injury and Illness Prevention plans and hazard Communication plans) with numerous meticulously specified requirements for employee training, incident recordkeeping (with very low thresholds for required action like harsh looks or utterance of harsh words).  The agency intends to bring a proposed regulation to the board, triggering an advisory committee process that could result in a proposed final regulation in late 2023 or 2024.