Tag Archives: occupational health and safety software

Is COVID-19 the Most Powerful Catalyst for Permanent Workplace Change?

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While some precautions and new ways of working were temporary during the initial pandemic outbreak – like masking while at work – others are here to stay, such as remote work for digital knowledge workers and labor market disruptions related to “essential” workers.

COVID-19 has been the most powerful catalyst for workplace change and technology adoption during these past three years. It has also placed new stresses on workers and given pause to the notion of what occupational safety in today’s workplace means.

“The most obvious future-of-work trend today is the role that SARS Coronavirus 2 (COVID-19) has played in our immediate past, the role its many variants and sub-variants play in our present day and what role the coronavirus will play in our future. It is a megatrend that may dictate how future work is organized,” says John Howard, the director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and … Read more...

U.S. Department of Labor Initiates Rulemaking to Protect Workers from Heat

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Work-related heat stress is a well-known and largely preventable hazard both indoors and outdoors.
Work-related heat stress is a well-known and largely preventable hazard both indoors and outdoors. OSHA is developing a national emphasis program on heat inspections and launching a rulemaking process to develop a workplace heat standard.

Both indoor and outdoor workers can be exposed to working conditions made hazardous by heat, and this past summer’s record-breaking temperatures have made it impossible for the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to ignore the dangers of work-related heat stress and exposure.

Record-breaking heat in the United States in 2021 endangered millions of workers, exposing them to heat illness and injury in both indoor and outdoor work environments. Workers without adequate climate-controlled environments are at risk of hazardous heat exposure, and workers of color are exposed disproportionately to hazardous levels of heat in essential jobs across these work settings.

In concert with a Biden-Harris administration interagency … Read more...

Managing Worker Health in a Post-COVID World

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The work on containing the virus continues, with a combination of controls such as masking and social distancing, vaccinations and boosters, contact tracking and tracing along with high-specificity, rapid testing that enables targeted quarantining around known outbreaks rather than widespread lockdowns.
The work on containing the virus continues, with a combination of controls such as masking and social distancing, vaccinations and boosters, contact tracking and tracing along with high-specificity, rapid testing that enables targeted quarantining around known outbreaks rather than widespread lockdowns.

Post-COVID, you say? Is the post-COVID dream real, or will we be dealing with it in some way, shape or form for years to come?

Even 18+ months into this pandemic, there are still too many uncertainties to make definitive statements regarding the future. We don’t have the answers regarding long-term immunity from infection and/or vaccine, we don’t know the seasonal impact of the virus and we can’t begin to guess how the virus may mutate or evolve in the future. Depending on the answers to these questions and others, we could see anything from annual winter outbreaks to permanent immunity, which would cause the virus to burn itself … Read more...