BARRY COMMONER CENTER for Health & the Environment
The Barry Commoner Center for Health and the Environment at Queens College of the City University of New York endorses the following COVID-19 practices in relation to occupational health and safety:
WORKFORCE BEST PRACTICES FOR COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic has created an urgent need for companies to adopt best practices to protect their workers, their customers and the communities they serve. We encourage companies to adopt the following recommended policies and practices that were developed in consultation with occupational and public health experts: • Only Essential Goods and Services To protect public safety, businesses should restrict activity to the provision of essential goods and services, such as food, medicine, household cleaning, auto fuel, and personal hygiene. • Independent Expertise Employers should consult independent certified industrial hygienists, occupational physicians, and public health experts to advise them on how these best practices for the prevention of infection should be incorporated into each specific operating environment. • Workplace COVID-19 Prevention and Control Plan Employers should develop, with participation of impacted employees, a written infectious disease prevention and control plan (the Plan) with a hierarchy of controls, including specific requirements for hazard assessment, engineering controls such as high-efficiency air-filters and clear plastic “sneeze” barriers, administrative controls such as adjusting work schedules, regular sanitization, and providing regular paid breaks for employees to wash their hands and clean their workstations, adequate personal protective equipment, and employee training in all safety and health controls. This written plan should be made readily available to employees upon request. • Personal Protective Equipment After instituting engineering and administrative controls, employers should provide the necessary personal protective equipment (PPE) for their work setting, including respiratory protection (e.g. N95 disposable respirators), gloves, work clothing, and eye protection, as recommended by occupational safety and health experts. Given uncertainty regarding risks of COVID-19 infection, employers should err toward greater protection in selection of PPE. • Sanitization Employers should regularly sanitize workplaces, locker rooms, rest rooms, and break rooms. When an employee is infected employers should immediately close, ventilate, clean, and disinfect all areas or facilities where the infected individual worked for as long as defined in the Plan. • Identification, Contact Tracing, and Isolation Where workers are infected or symptomatic, employers should provide two weeks of paid time off, promptly inform other employees who have been in contact, offer free testing for the virus to infected/symptomatic and contacted workers, allot contacts paid time off to self-isolate, and inform public health authorities. • Social Distancing Employers should separate workstations to allow for physical distancing of at least six feet, unless additional engineering and administrative controls are implemented and more protective PPE is provided. Employers should adopt social distancing best practices