The government is going to need snitches in order to enforce its vaccine mandates at businesses because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration does not have the number of safety inspectors it would need to enforce compliance.

In other words, the Labor Department is going to need employees to snitch on fellow employees for not being vaccinated in order to have enforcement of the mandate, CBS News reported.

The 490-page regulation will cover American businesses with at least 100 workers, or about 84 million employees in all. So the government will rely upon a corps of informers to identify violations of the order: Employees who will presumably be concerned enough to turn in their own employers if their co-workers go unvaccinated or fail to undergo weekly tests to show they’re virus-free.

What’s not known is just how many employees will be willing to accept some risk to themselves — or their job security — for blowing the whistle on their own employers. Without them, though, experts say the government would find it harder to achieve its goal of requiring tens of millions of workers at large businesses to be fully vaccinated by January 4 or be tested weekly and wear a mask on the job.

Think about how terrifying that is. Citizens snitching on other citizens, people you may think of as friends, telling the authorities you are not vaccinated or not being tested.

“There is no army of OSHA inspectors that is going to be knocking on employers door or even calling them,” former OSHA chief of staff Debbie Berkowitz, who is now a fellow at Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, said. “They’re going to rely on workers and their union representatives to file complaints where the company is totally flouting the law.”

The mandate requires employers to keep records on the vaccination status of their employees and where the employer does not require vaccinations the employees have to have weekly tests for COVID.

OSHA has said it will be doing spot checks of businesses to be certain that employers are complying but it is going to require whistleblowers to tell them which businesses are not complying with the mandate.

“We will have our staff available and responsive to complaints, which is a No. 1 way we hear about problems in a workplace,” OSHA acting Chief Jim Frederick said to reporters. He said the agency is going to focus on job sites “where workers need assistance to have a safe and healthy workplace.”

“That typically comes through in the form of a complaint,” he said.

But critics of the idea say that employees have faced retaliation from employers before when they have been whistleblowers and they have not gotten a ton of protection from OSHA.

Julie Vanneman, an attorney with Dentons Cohen & Grigsby, said that OSHA does not have the staff to enforce the mandate on its own.

“They have inspectors but they don’t have enough to do extensive pre-emptive investigations of employers,” she said. “However, OSHA tends to respond quite thoroughly to whistleblower complaints.”

Around 20 percent – 25 percent of OSHA inspections start with a complaint, CBS reported.

“You fill out a form or somebody fills out a form for you,” Berkowitz said. “And that’s all workers have. If OSHA decides not to inspect, that’s it. Or if OSHA inspects but decides not to cite the employer, that’s it. … So it’s a pretty weak law.”

And there is not a ton of incentive for an employee to report their employer.

“Technically,” he said. “the law says that companies can’t retaliate against a worker for waging a health and safety issue or filing an OSHA complaint or even reporting an injury. But retaliation is rampant.”

Former OSHA chief and professor of public health at George Washington University, David Michaels, said that the majority of employers want to comply with the standards.

“Most employers — they’re law-abiding,” he said. “They’re trying to make sure that they meet the requirements of every law and regulation…. Now OSHA will follow up. They’ll respond to complaints. They’ll do spot checks. They’ll issue citations and fines, and they’ll make a big deal of those” to discourage other potential violators.