New York, NY – In 2020, the pandemic shutdown dramatically curtailed building across the city and state. Fifty-four construction workers — a figure that would spark hair-on-fire outrage and shrieks of societal breakdown in virtually any other profession you can think of — still died on the job. A year prior to the pandemic, the total number of recorded deaths was 65.
NYCOSH — the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health — found the construction fatality rate actually increased almost 10-percent statewide during the Covid-19 slowdown. All this construction worker death constituted nearly 25-percent of New York State’s worker fatalities in 2020 — outpacing the national average of 21-percent.
None of these grim statistics, of course, is preventing or will prevent, developers in New York from continuing their sociopathic push to weaken industry protections and exploit vulnerable workers in the name of profit. On the contrary, they will keep trying to scrap New York’s Scaffold Law and block any and all new legislation meant to safeguard the lives of those who risk everything every time they show up for work in the morning.
Developers in New York will continue to cut out trade unionists from every job site under their control, while they endanger, abuse and mistreat every underpaid, ill-trained and poorly compensated nonunion construction worker they hire in their place.
And the vast majority of the exploited will be immigrant people of color often bullied into silence.
As they have done many times in the past decade I have been covering the labor beat, the authors of NYCOSH’s “Deadly Skyline” report have once again determined that Latino workers in New York State are more likely to die on the job.
“NYCOSH reports have consistently shown that Latino and/or immigrant workers are repeatedly exploited by employers who willfully violate safety and health protections on the job,” the authors write in this year’s report.
Latino workers represent roughly 10 percent of New York’s workforce — but in 2020, they constituted nearly 20-percent of worker fatalities.
Not at all surprisingly, NYCOSH also finds that of the 29 construction fatalities OSHA investigated throughout the state in 2020, nearly 80-percent of those killed on the job were working nonunion. Investigators for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration also looked into seven construction worker deaths on the streets of New York City and found — wait for it — one-hundred-percent of those were nonunion workers.
More and more, men and women in New York’s unionized Building Trades are being forced to watch their work go to vulnerable nonunion workers, who are then mercilessly exploited and often killed on the job. Just check those numbers again.
It’s an increasingly intolerable situation that no doubt helped propel trade unionists and nonunion workers rallying together outside the Terminal Warehouse in Chelsea last week, to march onto 12th Avenue at W27th Street and briefly shut down traffic.
“Someday, we’re gonna have to shut down this city,” an angry Joe Scopo, organizing director for the Laborers Union’s Cement and Concrete Workers District Council 16, declared ahead of the action.
Such an exercise in working class power would be something unknown to living memory. But at this point, it’s hard not to see how anything less than that, and the fundamental changes it would help usher in, would be the only thing that stops New York’s construction industry from bleeding workers to death.
