The Council’s training wreck

Watch out — your City Council is back at work in a hazard zone without a net. At the behest of construction unions generous with campaign contributions and hungry to lock out competition, the Council is speed-reading a third edition of a bill to mandate hours upon hours of classroom training for construction workers out of supposed concern for their safety.

Good sense must prevail before this legislation gets rammed into law next week.

Legislating glove in glove with Mayor de Blasio, the bill’s 47 sponsors bewail, as any feeling person should, the dozens of workers who have in recent years lost their lives on building projects to falls, blows and other accidents.

But the latest plan, as of Tuesday, is nothing close to a carefully crafted solution. It is, rather, yet another quintessentially Council push to pile layer upon layer of unmanageable bureaucracy upon an industry that could instead use an intelligently focused reform.

This need not be so complicated. Department of Buildings Commissioner Rick Chandler testified to the Council at the only hearing held on the ever-mutating bill, back in January, that buildings under 10 stories account for 71% of fatalities last year and just over half of all accidents.

As it happens, buildings under10 stories are the only ones exempt from a mandate the City Council imposed nine years ago for 10 hours of federally standardized safety training for all hardhats on a project — garnering a yes vote from then-Councilman Bill de Blasio.

The Council now should follow the very good recommendation of the union-backed New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health and require the 10 hours of training for all projects, big and small.

Rather than reach for that intelligent, focused and labor-friendly fix, the City Council goes wild.

Version one tried to force workers into apprenticeships in a blatant block-and-tackle offense for the unions. Version two would have required untold weeks of training — shutting down a construction site if a single worker forgot a single training-certification card on a single day.

The new bill is only sane in comparison to those disasters. Objectively, it makes no sense.

Atop the 10 hours of training, expanded to all construction sites, it piles on a minimum of another 30 hours — and leaves it to a task force to decide whether to go up to 55 hours in all.

You’re one of tens of thousands of freelance construction workers and can’t find a sponsor to pay for the classes, without which you’ll be out of a job? Somethingorother city agency will have you covered, at unknown cost.

At least this version finally acknowledges that there are hardly enough classrooms to accommodate the legions of hardhats who would need to sit for weeks of required training by a 2019 deadline. Under the redraft, the sessions could take place online — but only with a live human on the other end.

If this blueprint were a building it could never stand, so tilted is the field, so obvious the government-engineered winners and losers.