The manufacturers’ proposals include raising the legal bar for customers or employees to prove a business is at fault if they claim they contracted the virus there, protecting employers from some privacy suits in the event that they disclose a worker’s infection to other workers for safety reasons and giving added legal protections to companies that manufacture items during the crisis that are new to them — like personal protective equipment. Congress included a version of that liability limitation for manufacturers of masks in the rescue bill it passed last month.

A longer list circulated two weeks ago by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce includes some things the administration could do on its own — like Labor Department guidance about mask requirements and the steps it will deem sufficient to meet Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards. Others include steps only Congress could enact, like passing a law taking away people’s right to file lawsuits in state courts over allegations that a business was negligent in taking pandemic precautions. A range of legal specialists in civil lawsuits over claimed injuries and labor law said the business lobby’s requests include both sensible ideas that could be put in place quickly and politically implausible stretches. The risk, they said, is that if the lobby asks for too much, it could get bogged down, forestalling the changes needed for the eventual recovery.

Samuel Estreicher, a New York University Law School professor of labor and employment law, argued that it would make sense for the Labor Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to issue guidance about basic safety steps businesses should follow.

For example, he said, it would be useful to promulgate guidance that, if a business requires its workers and customers to wear masks and practice social distancing to the extent practicable, it would have a “safe harbor” from being considered by the federal government to be negligent — a standard that could also discourage state-court lawsuits. He also said it made sense to tell businesses they could require employees to pass a test for the virus before returning to work without running afoul of disability discrimination and health privacy laws.

But the chamber’s list, he says, goes far beyond that, ranging from tiny issues — like wanting to relieve employers from a need to provide masks or train employers in how to properly use them — to gutting hard-fought labor laws in ways that seem unjustified, like permitting employers to bar older workers from returning to work based on fears that they may be statistically more vulnerable to serious symptoms.

“This is a wish list for mini constituencies within the business community,” he said. “They should be focusing on what they need for immediately addressing legitimate concerns, so we can go back to work.”

Labor leaders reject the effort entirely. Mary Kay Henry, the president of the Service Employees International Union, said employers were still sometimes failing to provide personal protective equipment to workers, and she called the liability-limitation push “inhumane.”