Dive Brief:
- Seventy-four construction workers died in New York state in 2023, the most recently available data, according to a New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health report released Tuesday.
- Included in that total were New York City fatalities. In the city, 30 construction workers died in 2023, meaning that both the city and the state saw the highest raw number of deaths in the last decade, NYCOSH found.
- The annual NYCOSH report uses OSHA, Bureau of Labor Statistics and NYC Department of Buildings data to inform the annual report and offer recommendations on how to better protect construction workers.
Dive Insight:
In 2023, New York City recorded a fatality rate of 11.6 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, up from 11.5 the year before, while the state’s rate was 10.4 compared to 9.6 in 2022, an 8.3% increase. Rates can be a better indicator of the danger of work than the raw number of fatalities, which may increase or decrease with the number of workers.
For example, in 2020, New York City recorded 13 deaths, by far the fewest in the last 10 years. Nonetheless, construction activity slowed considerably that year due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The nationwide fatal work injury rate for construction in 2023 was 9.6 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The disproportionately high rate of Latinx worker deaths in New York also followed the national trend. In New York state, 26% of worker deaths were Latinx people, though they make up 10% of the state’s labor pool. The rate of Hispanic or Latino worker deaths in all industries nationwide was also higher than the nationwide rate for all workers.
Finally, NYCOSH indicated that on jobsites where workers died, “employers had coinciding OSHA violations 74% of the time.” That meant, for example, if a worker died from a fall, the employer had failed to provide training or implement fall protections.
Safety recommendations
NYCOSH’s report carried multiple suggestions to improve worker safety.
It recommends that municipalities across the state mandate construction training and certification and remove any financial barriers for workers to receive necessary training.
The report said that firms with repeat violations for egregious lapses of safety should be prevented from receiving public benefits or working on federal or state construction projects. Municipalities should also revoke the licenses of negligent contractors, NYCOSH said, and stop hiring construction firms with repeat offenses.
The report also called on district attorneys to take action against scofflaws, suggesting they do so by wielding enforcement like Carlos’ Law, which raised minimum criminal penalties against corporations responsible for injuries or deaths to $500,000 and the maximum to $1 million.
NYCOSH called for OSHA to be protected amid federal government shake-ups, and for the agency to receive more funding. It noted that the number of OSHA inspections has consistently dwindled across multiple administrations and have not reached pre-pandemic rates.
Meanwhile, the agency’s planned heat illness standard appears to be put on ice indefinitely. One legislator has also introduced a bill to nullify national OSHA, though experts claim such a law is far from realistic.
