United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 2013, celebrates the historic passage of the The New York Health and Essential Rights Act (“NY HERO Act”) as the first and only permanent Airborne Infectious Disease Standard in the country. UFCW Local 2013 Represents 12,000 workers in warehousing, manufacturing, logistics, food service, long term patient care, and other essential industries in New York City, Long Island, and Upstate New York. We support the implementation of the NY HERO Act with the modifications highlighted below.

Industry Standards

The NY HERO Act requires the Department of Labor to publish a model airborne infectious disease exposure prevention standard for industries representing a significant portion of the workforce, or those with unique characteristics requiring distinct standards. The NY HERO Act further requires the Department of Labor to publish a separate general model airborne infectious disease exposure prevention standard applicable to all worksites not included in the specific industry standards. These standards “shall establish minimum requirements for preventing exposure to airborne infectious diseases in the workplace.”

Despite being required of the NY HERO Act, DOL has not published industry-specific standards, but rather industry-specific plans which present a confusing mixture of instructions and recommendations to employers and employees. The published industry prevention plans are almost identical to each other and to the general model plan, and do not adequately consider the unique risks associated with differing types of work sites. This one size fits all approach will not adequately protect workers who face a diversity of physical environments, access to facilities, and obstacles to protecting against airborne infectious diseases.

Our membership works in a wide array of industries such as Warehousing, Long Term Care, Food Service, Retail, Manufacturing, Driving, Logistics, etc, each with its own challenges to stopping the spread of infectious disease. DOL should recognize this fact by issuing industry specific provisions to protect workers from the myriad vectors of transmission in all kinds of workplaces.

Requirements of NY HERO

The NY HERO Act requires that  the model standard and industry-specific standards include, but not be limited to, establishing requirements on the procedures and methods identified below. However, the existing emergency standards and proposed standards do not adequately include all of these requirements, in addition to other requirements that may be necessary for future airborne infectious diseases. We call on the DOL to incorporate the following modifications in the standards:

A few examples of how the current model standard and industry plans fall short for our Union’s membership include: