Legal brawl over Biden's vaccine mandate could curb other workplace safety efforts

Legal challenges to the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate are likely to end up in front of the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority seems ripe to limit the federal government’s ability to police workplaces in emergencies more broadly.

States, businesses and other groups have filed more than three dozen lawsuits seeking to overturn the requirement, announced earlier this month, that would make private businesses with more than 100 employees mandate vaccination against Covid-19 or have their employees submit to weekly testing for the virus. The requirement is supposed to kick in Jan. 4, but it has been stayed by a federal court based in New Orleans.

Some of the legal challenges argue, in part, that Congress didn’t give the Occupational Safety and Health Administration — the agency that issued the mandate — the authority to do so, and even if Congress did, then it shouldn’t have.

If the Supreme Court were to embrace that line of thinking, it could “have serious implications on the constitutionality” of other OSHA rules and regulations, said Benjamin Noren, associate chair of the Labor and Employment group at the law firm Davidoff Hutcher & Citron.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/legal-brawl-over-biden-s-vaccine-mandate-could-curb-other-workplace-safety-efforts/ar-AAQOWL9