ARTICLE
The COVID-19 pandemic has created many unique workplace safety issues for employers. One of the most challenging developments has been whether an employee’s COVID-19 case should go on your OSHA 300 logs pursuant to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) recordability guidance for employees’ cases of the virus and the impact of recording such an illness. Unless your company has 10 or fewer employees or your workplace is otherwise exempt from such requirements, OSHA encourages recording on your 300 logs work-related COVID-19 cases among your workforce. You have to record the COVID-19 case unless, after conducting a reasonable and good faith inquiry, you cannot determine whether it is more likely than not that exposure in the workplace caused a case of COVID-19. This requirement, and the number of lawsuits and workers’ compensation claims brought against employers related to COVID-19, has caused employers concerns about documenting that any workplace illness or injury related to the pandemic is work-related. Employers have asked whether recording COVID-19 infections as work-related on their OSHA 300 Logs allow such an admission, and whether that determination could be used by workers’ attorney in workers’ compensation claims to substantiate that employee exposure was work-related. The answers are not straightforward, as the summary reveals. Click here to read more.