If you’ve been regularly testing your employees for Covid over the past two plus years, you have done so under the guidance from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The EEOC updated their Frequently Asked Questions about workplace Covid testing on July 12. There are some subtle, but significant, changes you need to consider–which may result in reducing or eliminating testing in some situations. It could also lead to increasing testing in others!
“Job-related and consistent with business necessity.”
This is the consistent language the EEOC uses whenever they talk about medical testing or requirement under the Americans with Disabilities Act. To justify testing your employees for Covid, it needed to be “job-related and consistent with business necessity.”
That part hasn’t changed, but how a business should interpret that has.
To keep reading, click here: You Now Need to Have a Business Reason for Covid Testing Employees
I agree that organizations need to take another look at their testing policies, based on this new EEOC guidance. However, since almost all of the US is currently rated as areas of high community transmission, and the coming variant is deemed more severe than the latest ones, testing is still going to be a necessity in most cases. My agency has not been requiring regular testing. When Delta was at its worst, operations were severely hampered. At present, we’re receiving a steady stream of notifications of coworkers testing positive — obviously, from outside tests — with the requirement of everyone taking additional measures to protect themselves, plus intensive sanitations of their workplaces. At some point, someone will realize that it would be cheaper, and less disruptive, to impose a testing requirement.