Construction Informer

With the recent announcement by the New York City district attorney that a contractor is being charged with manslaughter in relationship to the death of a worker it is a grim reminder of not only the dangerous activities associated with construction but also the enormous responsibility imposed on those who undertake to manage these activities. 

It remains to be seen just how accountable the contractor will be held since according to at least one observer these types of cases are extremely difficult to prove. An editorial in the Daily News is skeptical that contractors are ever seriously held accountable and implies that is a familiar trend in construction. According to the editorial that also addressed a separate and recent accident where two brothers fell from a window washing scaffold:

OSHA charges, among other things, that the firms allowed the scaffold to be attached to the building with clamps that were destined to fail and that the brothers were not provided with safety harnesses to hold them aloft in case of scaffold failure.

Ruling the scaffold repair company and the contractor were guilty of gross negligence OSHA fined each of them $20,000. One of those brothers died in the accident.

There is another side to safety on construction sites that while probably not involved in the incidents above is certainly present to some degree on all jobs. That is the overwhelming difficulty in getting people to voluntarily comply with safety rules on the job and having enough visibility into what is really going on to make them think twice about not complying.

It seems safety efforts might be paid more attention to if workers who ignore safety rules and get injured as a result of that negligence bear the responsibility themselves rather than all those who tried in vain to convince them of the necessity to comply with safety rules.