A Senate bill to increase labor standards for employees during health emergencies was amended and passed out of the House policy committee ahead of last week’s cutoff. It currently waits to head to the House floor.
We last wrote about SB 5115 after it had been scaled down in the Senate. The bill has undergone more changes on its way out of the House Labor & Workplace Standards Committee, which passed the bill out on March 24 on a bipartisan 6-1 committee vote. The new version of the bill:
- Continues to create a rebuttable presumption of occupational disease for frontline workers during a declared public health emergency for the purposes of workers’ compensation. However, employers can rebut with a preponderance of evidence.
- Changes the threshold for large employers to report infections to L&I to 10 infected employees (rather than a percentage of employees) during health emergencies.
- Requires employers to provide written notice of potential exposure to employees who may have been exposed to an infection.
- Prohibits workplace discrimination against high-risk employees seeking accommodations or using leave options during health emergencies.
The bill provides an extensive list of “frontline” workers, including many that are common at cities, such as first responders and law enforcement, maintenance and janitorial staff, transit workers, and corrections employees, among others.
A more extensive list is available in the most recent bill report here. The new version of the bill also provides
that a retrospective rating group (like AWC’s Retro program) could be liable for the costs of appeal of a workers’ compensation if the retro agency was the opposing party against a prevailing worker seeking workers’ compensation.
The bill is now expected to go to the House Rules Committee to await scheduling for a floor vote. The bill will then have until the opposite house floor cutoff on April 11 to be voted out of the House and sent back to the Senate for concurrence in the
House’s amendments.