Pub 9 2020-2021 Issue 1

22 San Diego Dealer This deadline may change, though, and employers may see a rein- statement and expansion of the mandate. As of Feb. 22, 2021, the nearly $2 trillion “American Rescue Plan” working its way through Congress would reinstate the EFML and EPSL leave for employers who qualified under the FFCRA. The law would also impose this same leave mandate on employers with more than 500 employees. Under this plan, only employers with fewer than 500 employees could be reimbursed for this leave’s full cost. While the FFCRA leave mandate did not apply to employers with over 500 employees, California enacted Assembly Bill 1867 (“AB 1867”) in September, which effectively extended the paid leave provisions of the FFCRA to large employers in California. The California legislature included a caveat in AB 1867 that also extended the bill beyond 2020 if the FFCRA was amended. Therefore, because Congress extended the FFCRA in the Spending Bill, qualifying employers with 500 or more employees must continue to offer up to 80 hours of paid leave if an employee qualifies. In September of 2020, San Diego County adopted an ordinance also requiring that employers with 500 or more employees offer up to 80 hours of paid sick leave to employees. This temporary ordinance expired on Jan. 1, 2021, and has not been extended. Cal/OSHA Emergency Regulations Cal/OSHA finalized new temporary emergency standards for employers to prevent the spread of COVID-19 on Nov. 30, 2020. These regulations largely reinforce the requirements of the Governor’s Blueprint for a Safer Economy guidance. This guidance remains crucial for San Diego dealers because the current San Diego County health order last issued Feb. 6, 2021, requires compliance with these rules for any essential business to remain open. That means that dealerships that are not compliant with the guidance could face enforcement from the state or county and liability under the Cal/OSHA regulations. The basic requirements are as follows: • Establish, implement, and maintain an effective written COVID-19 Prevention Program that includes: o Identifying and evaluating employee exposures to COVID-19 health hazards. o Implementing effective policies and procedures to correct unsafe and unhealthy conditions (such as safe physical distancing, modifying the workplace and staggering work schedules). o Providing and ensuring workers wear face coverings to prevent exposure in the workplace. o Provide effective training and instruction to employees on how COVID-19 is spread, infection prevention techniques and information regarding COVID-19-related benefits that affected employees may be entitled to under applicable federal, state or local laws. • If there are three ormore cases of COVID-19within 14 days at aworkplace, offer COVID-19 testing to potentially exposed employees at no cost to the employees during their working hours and provide them with information on COVID-19 related benefits. • Contact the local health department no later than 48 hours after learning of three or more COVID-19 cases within 14-days to obtain guidance on preventing the further spread of COVID-19 within their workplace. • Maintain a record of and track all COVID-19 cases among employees while ensuring medical information remains confidential. These records must be made available to employees, authorized employee representatives or otherwise required by law, with personal identifying information removed. The regulation also sets out specific standards for determining if an “exposure” to COVID-19 has occurred at a workplace. The regulation defines exposure to COVID-19 as any time an employee was within six feet of a positive COVID-19 case for a cumulative total of 15 minutes within any 24-hour period during the COVID-19 case’s “high-risk exposure period.” The high-risk exposure period is: • If COVID-19 symptoms present: from two days before symptoms first developed symptoms until 10 days after symptoms first appeared, and 24 hours have passed with no fever without the use of fever-reducing medications, and symptoms have improved. • If COVID-19 symptoms not present: from two days before until 10 days after the specimen for the first positive test for COVID-19 was collected. These specific rules should provide businesses with greater certainty in determining which employees should quarantine due to exposure to COVID-19. They also highlight the importance of instructing employees not to come to work when they have symptoms of COVID-19 or suspect they have been exposed to COVID-19. The less time a potentially ill person spends at the dealership, the less likely the employee will cause additional exposures. SB 1159: COVID-19 and Workers’ Compensation California passed SB 1159 in the fall, and it went into immediate effect. The law formalizes the State’s approach to COVID-19 and workers’ com- pensation. First, it creates a rebuttable presumption that an employee contracted COVID-19 at work if all of the following apply: • The employee works for the employer with five or more employees; • The employee tests positive for COVID-19 within 14 days after reporting to his or her place of employment; and • This occurs dur ing a COVID-19 “outbreak” at the employee’s specif ic workplace. For most dealers, an outbreak occurs when, over a 14 day period, four or more employees test positive for COVID-19 at a single dealership facility. Specifically, if a workplace has 100 or fewer employees, the threshold for an outbreak is four employees; if the workplace has more than 100 employees, the threshold is 4%. A workplace is defined as a “building, store, facility or agricultural field” and does not include an employee’s home. For dealerships with a single facility, we recommend treating that as a single workplace. If it has two or more facilities on the same lot, we recommend treating them as two separate facilities unless employees regularly use space in both facilities. Facilities that are on different lots should be treated as separate workplaces. Individual employees who work at multiple workplaces should be counted as a positive case at each facility they work at. If the local or state health department shuts the workplace down due to the risk of COVID-19 infection, the workplace is deemed to be experiencing an outbreak. San Diego County has not shutdown a dealership in at least the last 60 days, but it retains the authority to do so. Continued from page 21