A shaky safety edifice
City Council members rushing to impose an onerous new training and registration regime on every construction site in New York City do so in the name of workers who are dying in far too large numbers on the job: 34 since the start of 2015. But in their unbridled enthusiasm for bureaucratic overkill, Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn and the solid majority who have signed onto his legislation would punish the very people they aim to help — while piling enforcement responsibility on a city agency already buckling under the weight of its current workload.
The latest version of a still-evolving measure sponsored by Williams would require all workers at construction sites to either have union training programs under their belts or complete an arbitrarily long 59 hours of coursework — in person, not online — covering 26 separate topics, from lead awareness to exit routes to sidewalk sheds, before doing any work whatsoever.
No matter their area of specialty, all hardhats would have to carry certificates of completion in the sweeping curriculum — akin to requiring every busboy to know the correct temperature at which to cook pork.
A single missing card would result in the entire construction project being shut down by the Department of Buildings until that worker finishes the class.
Do the math. With an estimated 180,000 construction workers in the city, a rough half of them non-union, that’s a demand for 6 million hours of classes to be taught by July of next year — by what is now a handful of providers, in multiple languages, in classes federal safety rules limit to 40 students a pop. This is insanity. And that’s not counting the additional specialized training to be contemplated by a task force the Council looks to convene, plus recertification every few years thereafter.
And pity the poor freelance laborer without an employer to sponsor his or her two weeks of study, estimated to cost upwards of $2,000. Simple economics suggest thousands would be put out of work.
If that weren’t bad enough, the strapped Department of Buildings would be charged with ensuring that all of those tens of thousands of cards are present and legit — on top of its vast existing duties to inspect the safety of structures.
Just ask the federal safety agency OSHA how that goes. All construction workers on buildings 10 stories or higher have to carry cards certifying they’ve had 10 hours of training, with some jobs requiring 30 hours — resulting in what Public Advocate Tish James flags as a black market in fraudulent cards.
The Council banks on high-tech, fraud-proof cards of the kind OSHA’s now phasing in — without actually asking why the city must create a duplicate training and enforcement regime, or what extensive new mandates could mean for the already sky-high cost of housing.
Why not, for starters, extend the 10-hour requirement to all building sites — given that three in four recent fatalities were on projects not subject even to OSHA’s minimal training?
Why leap to 59 hours, a standard pulled out of thin air, with no equivalent in any major city, the only seeming effect to be that placing an impossible burden on non-union laborers?
In that question lies the answer.