Are New York Construction Workers Safer? Depends on How You Count

On the afternoon of November 6 2023, Francisco Lumbreras, 52, was working for a site preparation contractor in the Bronx applying grease with a grease gun to a fitting located in the back of a ready-mix deliver truck. He took a step or two back, according to federal safety records, when his clothes were caught by the rotating shaft that drives the vibration air valves.

He tried to free himself from the spinning shaft, and a coworker heard him shout and turned off the power. But by then Lumbreras had had been pulled in, cutting and crushing his upper body, killing him.

New York City has characterized 2023 as a year of construction safety success, at least when it comes to building construction projects, where the city said there were only seven fatalities, down from 11 in 2022, according to the Dept. of Buildings. The year 2023 marked the first year for Carlos' Law, a statewide measure which increases penalties for criminal corporate liability in cases involving worker deaths or serious injuries.

The trouble is, how much safety progress you can count in New York City and New York State depends greatly on how the counting is done and who does it.

Those differences were never clearer than in recent weeks.

A new report from the New York State Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), a watchdog and advocacy group, said construction fatalities in New York City continued to rise, noting that 30 construction workers died in New York City in 2023, compared to 24 in 2022 and 20 in 2021.

New York State, too, had seen "a sharp increase of 48%" in construction fatalities in those years, said the NYCOSH report, rising from 50 fatalities in 2022 to 74 in 2023. The report noted the high number of Latinx workers in accidents and said there were more accidents at open-shop employers. Safety enforcement needed more resources, NYCOSH recommended.

Safety Data Differences

Samantha Fisher, the main author of the NYCOSH report, said in an email that the difference in numbers between NYCOSH and the city's Dept. of Buildings is that the department has a narrower scope and that its "main focus is public safety, not tracking every worker fatality." NYCOSH, she explains, casts a broader informational net in researching fatal accidents in all types of construction, not just building-related. And she noted that the Dept. of Buildings data year may not match up with that of federal safety databases.

This month, for the first time, New York State's open-shop contractors issued a sharp denunciation of the report from NYCOSH, whose funding sources include unions, saying its data was misleading and that its conclusions and findings were motivated by anti-open shop bias.

"Instead of presenting an honest assessment, NYCOSH inflates fatality numbers by including incidents unrelated to building construction, such as window washing to mislead the public and policymakers," the state's chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors claims in a press release.

Chapter President Brian Sampson said that every year in its report "NYCOSH counts non-construction-related incidents to exaggerate the number of fatalities." The ABC chapter cites the improved safety statistics noted by the New York City Dept. of Buildings.

The year 2023 marks, says Sampson, "a nine-year low in building construction-related fatalities which directly contradicts NYCOSH’s claim of 30 deaths. The reality is that construction in New York City is getting safer."

Deputy Editor Richard Korman helps run ENR's business and legal news and investigations, selects ENR's commentary and oversees editorial content on ENR.com. In 2023 the American Society of Business Publication Editors awarded Richard the Stephen Barr Award, the highest honor for a single feature story or investigation, for his story on the aftermath of a terrible auto crash in Kentucky in 2019, and in 2015 the American Business Media awarded him the Timothy White Award for investigations of surety fraud and workplace bullying. A member of Investigative Reporters and Editors, Richard has been a fellow on drone safety with the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Richard's freelance writing has appeared in the Seattle Times, the New York Times, Business Week and the websites of The Atlantic and Salon.com. He admires construction projects that finish on time and budget, compensate all team members fairly and record zero fatalities or serious injuries.