A bill to increase health-related labor standards during public health emergencies was scaled down and passed out of committee earlier this week; it now awaits a floor vote in the Senate.

We wrote last week that SB 5115 (aka the Health Emergency Labor Standards Act or HELSA) was scheduled to be voted out of committee ahead of last week’s first policy committee cutoff. The committee did in fact amend the bill and vote it out of committee on a party line vote. The amendments largely scaled back the bill to primarily address workers’ compensation and employer reporting requirements during statewide public health emergencies declared by the Governor or U.S. President.

As we’ve previously noted, HELSA originally would have included provisions on personal protective equipment, whistleblower protections, paid family & medical leave expansion, sick and childcare leave, and hazard pay for frontline workers. Many of those provisions proved to be contentious and expensive and were removed from the bill in the amendments adopted in committee.

The current version of the bill includes:

• Presumption of workplace infection: would create a rebuttable presumption that a transmissible, respiratory disease that is the subject of a public health emergency is an occupational disease for frontline workers for the purposes of workers compensation. The bill would allow employers to rebut the presumption and describes the appeals process to do so.
• Workforce infection reporting to L&I: would require large employers (over 50 employees) to report to L&I if 5% or more of their workforce tested positive with a disease that is the subject of the public health emergency. Small employers (50 or less employees) would report at 10% workforce infection.
• Employer reporting to employees: Employers must provide written notice to employees, their union, and employers of subcontractors of potential exposures to a public health emergency subject disease while on the job. The bill provides details on what constitutes adequate notice.
• Definition of “Public health emergency” that triggers the health labor standards in the bill are limited to statewide emergency declarations, not local or regional ones.

As before, the bill contains a long list of the kinds of workers considered “frontline employees,” including first responders and emergency services workers, health care personnel, facility maintenance, mass transit operators, and public library staff, among others, that would be eligible for the workplace infection presumption. The occupational disease presumption would be limited only to public health emergency diseases that are spread through respiratory droplets and aerosols, or through contact with contaminated surfaces.

The amendments to the bill make HELSA a much more COVID-19 (or similar disease) pandemic-specific bill, rather than earlier versions whose provisions could be triggered by a wide number of health emergencies at a variety of geographic scales. The bill is currently on second reading, meaning it is eligible for the Senate to schedule it for a vote at any time.