By Ruth Kiefer, MSc, ARM, Vice President of Loss Control

My team and I have been trying to keep up with these crazy times and have developed a tool-kit on our portal to help assist you with this event. The MTMIC Loss Control Department is eager to assist you with providing a safe workplace for your current employees. To help you with this, we have developed Best Practices for protecting your employees, a medical check log, and have tried to clear the interpretation of how to report Covid-19 on your 300s if any employees test positive for the virus.

We have been and will be reaching out to you individually to help you through this time of uncertainty. We will continue to update our Covid-19 files on the portal so that you have current and up-to-date information in this situation. As May quickly approaches and hopefully back to some normalcy, we are also developing work practices for when you bring back your employees. This will require some additional preparations on your part since the virus will not be gone, we do not have a vaccine or a cure yet. Social distancing will continue and you will still have to separate work stations, so they are six feet apart. Other options are staggering work shifts, breaks, and lunches so that you are limiting grouping of workers. You may have to select certain doors for entrance or egress so employees are not passing each other at shift change. You may need or pre-order PPE (masks, gloves, face shields) or additional hand sanitizer and EPA approved cleaning supplies. As cleaning supplies are scarce you may need to use a bleach/water mix with rags to clean surfaces. There may also be some program development and pre-training required for employees to help them to identify when employees are sick, what they should do, how to quarantine them, and what your policies will be. You may need to remain flexible with sick leave and PTO policies. Your office staff may still need to tele-work from home, but also need to be aware of the changes made on the production floor.

We are also providing Lear’s Safe Work Playbook onto our portal. They are a 20-billion-dollar company with 261 plants worldwide with 170,000 employees. They have successfully re-opened plants in China and Korea that are currently running at 65 -75% with no cases of Covid-19 infections after implementing their best practices from their safe work playbook. Ray Scott, the CEO of Lear, is also planning to launch soft openings in Spain, Italy, and Michigan once the stay home orders are lifted. Ray Scott, is committed to the safety of all workers, be it his or others. During a recent teleconference, Ray stated this is a time to work together for the safety of all workers. Our department agrees with that statement and we need collaboration between all of us to help us through this unprecedented event.

With the day to day changes and updates to this event, those mentioned above, and many other work practices seem to change on a continuous basis. Please know the MTMIC team is working with industry leaders in manufacturing, updating CDC guidance and using public health data and information to provide you with the best and latest information. Since this is a fluid event, please check back frequently to the portal or reach out to your Loss Control Representative if you have specific questions. I know this is a difficult time for us all, but we are strong and perseverant, we’re manufacturers, and we will get through this. Stay safe and be well.