Safety & Health
Are New York Construction Workers Safer? Depends on How You Count
NYCOSH portrays construction safety in New York City and New York State differently than the New York City Dept. of Buildings and the Empire State Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors. Graphic: ENR Art Dept.
On the afternoon of November 6, 2023, Francisco Lumbreras, 52, was working for a site preparation contractor in the Bronx applying grease with a grease gun to a fitting located in the back of a ready-mix delivery truck. He took a step or two back, according to federal safety records, when his clothes were caught by the rotating shaft that drives the vibration air valves. He tried to free himself from the spinning shaft, and a coworker heard him shout and turned off the power. But by then Lumbreras had been pulled in, cutting and crushing his upper body, killing him.
New York City has characterized 2023 as a year of construction safety success, at least when it comes to building construction projects, where the city said there were only seven fatalities, down from 11 in 2022, according to the Dept. of Buildings.
The year 2023 marked the first year for Carlos' Law, a statewide measure that increases penalties for criminal corporate liability in cases involving worker deaths or serious injuries.
The trouble is, how much safety progress you can count in New York City and New York State depends greatly on how the counting is done and who does it.
Those differences were never clearer than in recent weeks.
A new report from the New York State Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a watchdog and advocacy group, said construction fatalities in New York City continued to rise, noting that 30 construction workers died in New York City in 2023, compared to 24 in 2022 and 20 in 2021.
New York State, too, had seen "a sharp increase of 48%" in construction fatalities in those years, said the NYCOSH report, rising from 50 fatalities in 2022 to 74 in 2023. The report noted the high number of Latinx workers in accidents and said there were more accidents at open-shop employers. Safety enforcement needed more resources, NYCOSH recommended.
Safety Data Differences
Samantha Fisher, the main author of the NYCOSH report, said in an email that the difference in numbers between NYCOSH and the city's Dept. of Buildings is that the department has a narrower scope and that its "main focus is public safety, not tracking every worker fatality." NYCOSH, she explains, casts a broader informational net in researching fatal accidents in all types of construction, not just building-related. And she noted that the Dept. of Buildings' data year may not match up with that of federal safety databases.
This month, for the first time, New York State's open-shop contractors issued a sharp denunciation of the NYCOSH report, whose funding sources include unions, saying its data was misleading and that its conclusions and findings were motivated by anti-open shop bias.
"Instead of presenting an honest assessment, NYCOSH inflates fatality numbers by including incidents unrelated to building construction, such as window washing, to mislead the public and policymakers," the state's chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors claims in a press release.
Chapter President Brian Sampson said that every year in its report "NYCOSH counts non-construction-related incidents to exaggerate the number of fatalities." The ABC chapter cites the improved safety statistics noted by the New York City Dept. of Buildings.
The year 2023 marks, says Sampson, "a nine-year low in building construction-related fatalities which directly contradicts NYCOSH’s claim of 30 deaths. The reality is that construction in New York City is getting safer."
