This paper examines legal communication in Occupational Health and Safety
(OHS) discourse and investigates the rhetorical strategies implemented at the
height of the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, the paper focuses on a dataset
of legal provisions introduced as emergency legislation – measures adopted to
tackle unprecedented circumstances – in Italy and the US, in order to iden tify commonalities and differences when informing the general public of the
measures laid down particularly to protect workers in the workplace. This
paper is intended to contribute to research in discourse analysis in OHS, an
area of expertise which has been given fresh momentum since the onset of the
pandemic. The decision to examine Italian and US emergency legislation was
made in consideration of the cultural and legal differences between the two
countries, which give rise to a number of discursive approaches to emergency
management.
