On January 13, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order staying the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s (OSHA) emergency temporary standards (ETS) requiring employers with 100 or more employees to enact written workplace policies mandating full vaccination or weekly testing of its workforce — which would have affected an estimated 84 million workers in the United States.
As previously reported, the ETS was heavily litigated based on an argument that OSHA overstepped its authority in issuing such a mandate, but a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling allowed the mandate to take effect — and then multiple parties filed emergency motions with the U.S. Supreme Court to block its enforcement.
And block its enforcement, the Supreme Court did: Although the high court didn’t rule on the merits of challenges to the ETS, the order to stay the ETS’s enforcement while the mandate’s merits are litigated through the court system effectively eliminates the federal ETS for the foreseeable future.