{"id":15408,"date":"2014-07-16T14:22:54","date_gmt":"2014-07-16T18:22:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.glensfalls.com\/glensfallsbusinessjournal\/2014\/07\/my-turn-keeping-scaffold-law-protects-workers.html"},"modified":"2017-11-08T11:05:24","modified_gmt":"2017-11-08T16:05:24","slug":"my-turn-keeping-scaffold-law-protects-workers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.glensfalls.com\/glensfallsbusinessjournal\/2014\/07\/my-turn-keeping-scaffold-law-protects-workers\/","title":{"rendered":"My Turn: Keeping Scaffold Law Protects Workers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n\"scaffold\n<\/div>\n
Joan Shirikian-Hesselton, Northeast Coalition on Occupational Health & Safety.\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

By Joan Shirikian-Hesselton<\/p>\n

For another year, Albany has passed on ‘reforming’ the Scaffold Safety Law. And that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n

Few debates in Albany are as the misleading as the one surrounding this critical worker safety protection for New York construction workers. Construction remains one of the most dangerous jobs in the nation, especially for Latino and immigrant workers. In New York alone, there were 101 fatal construction accidents from 2009 to 2011. Many more were injured, often in debilitating fashion. And with so much new construction underway throughout the state, it seems like the news reports nearly every week on another tragic accident.
\nBut New York construction workers have an important but oft-misunderstood protection on their side: the Scaffold Safety Law. The law’s premise is simple: that the people who control construction worksite operations, general contractors and property owners, are responsible for ensuring basic safety rules for working at elevation are followed on their worksites.<\/p>\n

If they fail to do so, and a worker is injured or killed as a result, they’re held liable. If, however, they follow the rules, they won’t be held liable.<\/p>\n

This law has been a powerful incentive for safety in a dangerous industry. And despite the huge amount of construction here, New York actually can claim the nation’s fifth-lowest injury rate, thanks in part to the Scaffold Safety Law.<\/p>\n

Yet the construction industry has been waging war on it for years, claiming it’s too expensive to ensure workers are safe. They argue (falsely) that New York is the only state with such a law, when in fact many other states have stronger safety standards (some states even have criminal penalties for breaking safety rules).<\/p>\n

They further argue the Law is single-handedly making construction far more expensive by driving up liability insurance costs, and therein slowing business growth – despite the continued rise in new construction across the state.<\/p>\n

This past year, they turned to academic researchers to try and bolster their case, spending $82,800 to commission SUNY-Albany’s Rockefeller Institute to study the impact of the Scaffold Safety Law.<\/p>\n

Remember that old saying, you get what you pay for? Well in this case, that adage couldn’t be more appropriate.<\/p>\n

Our partners in New York City, the NY Committee on Occupational Safety & Health, and the Center for Popular Democracy released a report detailing some of the many flaws in the Rockefeller study, decrying in particular its “far-fetched” and “counterintuitive” central claim: that the Law actually causes more accidents, not less.<\/p>\n

As Richard W. Hurd, professor and associate dean at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations noted in the Insurance Journal, “If employers are financially liable for injury and death, would they not be more likely to invest in safety?” Since then, Rockefeller Institute Director Thomas Gais started backpedaling, even going so far as to tell the Chronicle of Higher Education that the research was “just really awful” and deeming it not officially a research product of the Institute.<\/p>\n

The study is now the subject of multiple Freedom of Information requests, including one seeking to discover what role the law’s primary opponent – an industry-backed front group – played in shaping this “research.” But none of this has stopped that same group from peddling the flawed research around the state – including last month in a column here in the Saratoga Business Journal and Glen Falls Business Journal.<\/p>\n

In general, opponents are fixated on the high cost of liability insurance, arguing this is purely the result of the Scaffold Safety Law – even though insurance rates have been rising nationally, in states with and without similar laws, for years.<\/p>\n

Nobody likes high insurance costs – us included. That’s why we support a bill designed to shed light on what’s really driving these liability insurance costs. That bill would force insurers to open their books to disclose actuarial data that can be properly evaluated – data that is not currently available.<\/p>\n

With workers’ lives at stake, we believe it is critical that policymakers looking at the Scaffold Safety Law have this information before them. Yet opponents of the Scaffold Safety Law, joined by the American Insurance Association, are urging lawmakers to reject this common-sense transparency bill. Instead, these groups want our lawmakers to move full steam ahead with gutting the Scaffold Safety Law.<\/p>\n

Such a step would be wildly dangerous. That’s why the Albany Times-Union recently editorialized on this issue, urging lawmakers to leave the law intact in the absence of any hard data.<\/p>\n

I urge our legislators: Don’t give in to the industry’s whim. Leave the Scaffold Safety Law alone. Do so, and you’ll help ensure the safety of our friends, family and neighbors. After all, they’re the people who literally build up our communities.<\/p>\n

Shirikian-Hesselton is secretary of the Northeast New York Coalition on Occupational Safety & Health.<\/p>\n

Photo Courtesy Northeast Coalition on Occupational Health & Safety<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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