As discussed, in some hazard situations, there are legal requirements that employers must meet if within certain parameters such as having ten or more employees, having certain hazards present within their operations and more (OSHA, n.d.). In other cases, even without regulatory requirements, national consensus standards from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) and other agencies exist (CDC, n.d.). In yet other cases, even with regulatory or national consensus standards, a recognized workplace hazard still requires due diligence in hazard control as per the General Duty Clause of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 (OSHA, 1970).
However, it is at this point that a certain level of ambiguity sets in. Short of regulatory standards or peer-reviewed guidance, or even in the context of organizations determining whether they will comply with these standards or to what degree of diligence they will pay to hazard control, organizational risk management processes become matters of perception and opinion. This perception and opinion can even exist at the federal legislative and executive levels; the Trump Administration has deregulated workplace safety (Kullgren, 2018), environmental (Popovich, Albeck-Ripka & Pierre-Louis, 2020) and a plethora of other areas (Brookings, n.d.). In other cases, Senator Mitch McConnell has led efforts to develop liability protection for employers from compensation cases rooted in COVID-19 exposures regardless of the employer’s diligence in exposure prevention (Mueller, 2020).