COVID-19 DISRUPTION & RESPONSE
Safety & Health Council Continued from page 11
employees, Mergen said. “We didn’t want to have 900 companies having to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to make sure that we gave them the most tools and resources possible so that their time and focus could be on the job and their workforce.”
Collaborating and Sharing Best Practices
Te AGC Safety & Health
Council’s efforts to come together and share best practices contributed to the development of the growing body of documents and informational links about COVID-19 that can be found on AGC’s website (
www.agc-ca.org/ COVID19). Within a week of the first jobsite order being released in the San Francisco Bay Area, over 45 safety and health professionals convened on a call to share what was working in their
“We didn’t want to have 900 companies having to reinvent the wheel. We wanted to make sure that we gave them the most tools and resources possible so that their time and focus could be on the job and their workforce.”
– Kate Mergen
companies, discuss common challenges, and weigh in on the COVID-19 “playbook” for members, bringing a range of perspectives to the table. “Te cool thing about our members
Construction Law Group
is they all have what’s best for the industry at heart versus just what’s best for them individually,” Mergen said. “When you can get GCs and subs and suppliers in the same room, you can vet out issues at different levels to make sure you’re covering them well. Just having that collaboration as a group within AGC was really influential.” For his part,
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Seeber said it was satisfying to be part of the solution in responding to the disruption. “I was proud to be part of that team that put these resources together,” he said. “It was cool how everybody was willing to share what they were doing. Safety is not proprietary, and
everybody really lived up to that by sharing what they were doing.”
Shaping Policy on Regulatory Front
AGC’s Government Affairs
Department, in concert with its Safety & Health Council, also continues to actively engage on the regulatory front with a variety of agencies and depart- ments at the federal, state and regional levels to shape policy. Tey have worked through National AGC with Fed OSHA to ensure members were meeting all the protocols required and that regulations adopted at the federal level were implemented at the state level by Cal/OSHA. Te association remains highly
engaged and active in the ongoing battle fighting for employers and member interests when it comes to workers’ compensation impacts of COVID-19 as well. In a May 6 statement released by the association, of noted concern in Governor Newsom’s Executive Order N 62-20 was the allowance of COVID-19 cases to be presumptively determined to be work related. As part of a broad business coalition, AGC successfully advocated for substantial concessions from the language circulating in the legislature, but acknowledged there was significant work still to be done. Tere are no doubt many safety
and health-related challenges and regulatory issues still ahead that AGC and the Safety & Health Council will continue to take the lead on as they develop additional resources for members and the industry to help improve workplace safety. “Te biggest thing for us is that
safety has always been, and always will be, the number one priority for our industry,” Mergen said. “So the fact that we live and breathe that, whether we’re in a pandemic or not, I think really set our members up to be successful. We will continue to answer the call to action to come up with solutions for whatever challenges this crisis presents.”
California Constructor
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