Federal, state and local public health officials have repeatedly revised their guidance and instruction on general and worker health and safety as researchers learned more and more about the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, which causes COVID-19 disease, how it spreads, and how long the virus can live on surfaces. The learning curve for U.S. employers and their in-house counsel has been steep as organizations scrambled to adapt to everything from shelter-in-place and stop-work orders from state and local governments to the need for social distancing and remote work.

Now, as essential businesses, such as pharmacies, food producers and distributors, and retailers, such as Amazon, have continued to operate and even hired additional workers, some are facing job actions by workers claiming they are not being adequately protected from infection.

Walmart, for instance, has been hit with a wrongful death suit in Illinois by the family of an employee who died of COVID-19 alleging that the company failed to adequately clean the facility. Walmart said it has taken detailed safety measures.

Furthermore, everyone from doctors and nurses to postal workers, delivery people and construction workers are complaining about critical shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE, as the global supply chain fractured under the pandemic. Some medical personnel are saying that relaxed federal government safety guidelines allowing for reuse of scarce face masks and gowns and substitutions are also putting them at risk.

Nancy Inesta, a labor and employment litigator and partner at Baker & Hostetler in Los Angeles and a chair of the firm task force on COVID-19, said, "We anticipate there could be a trend where employees who got sick or employees who got sick and passed away, their families could take actions alleging that their employers failed to take adequate action to protect them in the workplace, despite companies' attempts to comply with guidelines."

And as the crisis continues, more and more businesses are resorting to furloughs and terminations, which is creating more work for their legal departments, who have to wrestle with state and federal WARN notices and state and federal civil rights laws prohibiting discrimination against protected groups. Others are seeking guidance on how to qualify for government aid.

We checked in with some lawyers to see how they're working with in-house counsel now, weeks into this pandemic.

Grappling with changing worker health, safety rules and guidance

In a turnabout from earlier statements by the U.S. Surgeon General and other health officials, who in February urged the public to stop buying masks and said only medical personnel needed them, the federal government issued new guidelines in April that encourage members of the public and workers to use face coverings in order to slow the spread of infection. 

Last week, New York's governor said he was ordering state residents to cover their faces in public where social distancing isn't possible as did governors of New Jersey and Maryland. Earlier, Los Angeles passed an ordinance requiring all essential businesses such as food suppliers to provide employees with face coverings whether cloth or other, Inesta said.

"They are obligated to wear them while performing their jobs and employers are obligated to provide them, an absolute shift on whether employers should require employees to wear masks" in combination with social distancing, she said.

Inesta said that "in advising clients about masks, we are having to look at the guidance that has been promulgated by agencies like the CDC, WHO and OSHA, which by the way, has changed over time. We are not medical doctors, we are attorneys, and we rely on the agencies to provide the parameters for employers."  

Because the guidance has been a moving target, she said she consults the agency web pages every day, but that some of the government's recommendations are also difficult for employers to meet. 

"It is problematic," she said. "Some of the guidance is not practical and not conducive to the business environment. Ultimately, some employers are having to make significant operational changes to continue to conduct business while concurrently complying with the agency recommendations."

Employers do have some legal cover, however, for making tough choices so long as they are following agency guidelines, Mavity said.  

"Under our law, workers' compensation is the sole remedy for an injured employee, but the injured or killed person doesn't have the right to sue for other damages," he said. "It is pretty much the same in all 50 states that the only time an employee can sue beyond that, and in order to get past the exclusive remedy bar, they have to prove that it was almost an intentional bad act by the employer of exposing employees to a situation a reasonable person would deem hazardous and not following CDC and OSHA guidelines."

Coping with labor shortages from ill employees and OSHA reporting requirements

Fisher Phillips' Mavity said some employers are struggling with labor shortages from the pandemic as more and more workers are quarantined or sent home because of an exposure to someone else with COVID-19, compounding the difficulty of remaining in operation. 

"It was easy to send people home for 14 days when this wasn't happening much, but now it is enough to shut the business down, even if you are an essential business." Mavity said that now employers are "wrestling with what to do when you have to send a person home every other day and there is no bright-line test. There are a lot of judgment calls. And the other is six feet of separation. In some instances, six feet is impossible. What do you do then? It may be a choice of choosing the least bad option." 

Mavity said that in hard-hit areas like New York City, some employers are already struggling with employees who are not ill but who are afraid to return to the workplace, a problem that might soon affect more employers as the federal and state governments move closer to trying to "reopen" the economy. 

Another issue for employers is whether or not they need to report an employee's case of COVID-19 to OSHA. "Employers were tearing their hair out trying to figure out if an employee testing positive COVID-19 was 'work-related,'" Ogletree, Deakins, Nash, Smoak & Stewart shareholder and litigator John F. Martin, who serves as OSHA counsel for three publicly traded companies, said. 

"Under new guidance from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, most employers should not consider COVID-19 cases to be reportable or recordable unless there is evidence that the case was related to work. This guidance is significant for employers, as it presumes that COVID-19 cases are not work-related unless there is objective evidence," he said.

Editor's note: This story is a condensed version of the full story from Corporate Counsel. The full story can be found here. 

Related:

• Managing employer risk in the age of the coronavirus – Part 1
• COVID-19, business interruption and bad faith litigation
• COVID-19 cases hit the courts