Labor unions back bill that would examine New York’s controversial Scaffold Law

ALBANY >> The state’s much maligned Scaffold Law drew strong support from labor unions and their allies Tuesday as they endorsed a bill forcing insurance companies to disclose costs related to the worker-injury measure.

“For years a moneyed coalition of insurance companies and property owners have been trying to get rid of a law that protects construction workers … construction remains the most fatal sector in America,” Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Queens), one of the sponsors of the Construction Insurance Transparency Act of 2015, said during a press conference.

He said insurance companies have never supplied any actual data to back up the claims made by opponents that the law, which places all liability for an accident on the employer, increases costs. Advocates said Tuesday that from 2009 to 2011, “there were 101 fatalities in New York alone. 74 percent of the victims of fatal construction falls in NYC and 60 percent of the victims statewide between 2003 and 2011 were Latino and/or immigrant workers.”

“The reality here is we hear tremendous complaints from people who are anti-scaffold law and that’s largely the real estate community and contracting community,” said Gary LaBarbera, president of the Building & Construction Trades Council of Greater New York.

“The problem is if you want to talk about debate and you want to talk about reform, you have to know the facts and we have been kept in the dark,” he said. “So we don’t know how relative their premiums going up is actually related to the scaffold law.”

The Lawsuit Reform Alliance, which is leading a push to repeal the current law, said Moya’s bill is “a diversionary tactic. Our coalition of over 60 organizations, representing businesses, builders, union contractors, affordable housing organizations, nonprofits, municipal groups, and taxpayers, has already provided tomes of national insurance data to lawmakers at all levels of government.”

“The data is clear: New York’s insurance costs are the highest in the nation, and the reason is the Scaffold Law. Far from earning outsized profits, insurance companies are abandoning the New York construction market entirely. We are encouraged that organized labor and the personal injury lawyer lobby has finally acknowledged the serious impacts of our astronomical construction insurance rates. Unfortunately, this misguided legislation does nothing to advance a meaningful discussion about Scaffold Law reform, which has strong bipartisan support.”

The bill requires all insurance companies that provide liability coverage under the state Scaffold Safety Law to issue file annual statements with the Department of Financial Services disclosing all information about how premiums are calculated.

The Scaffold Law, which the Lawsuit Reform Alliance calls “the greatest symbol of New York’s hostility toward business,” is the only one of its kind in the U.S. and lawmakers are under intense pressure this year to scale it back.

“The Scaffold Law holds contractors and property owners 100 percent ‘absolutely liable’ in lawsuits for gravity-related injuries, regardless of any contributing fault of a worker,” the Lawsuit Reform Alliance said last week during its annual lobbying day. “Advocates for reform are asking that the law be reformed to a ‘comparative negligence’ standard, where the conduct of the employee is considered when apportioning liability, just as it is done in every other state and every other part of New York’s civil justice system.”

“The Scaffold Safety Law is in place to prevent deaths and injuries to workers, it is not an economic development measure and should not be viewed in that light,” NYS AFL-CIO President Mario Cilento said in a legislative alert released this week. “Therefore the law should never be weakened.

In a statement Tuesday, he said the debate over the law “has been taken hostage by opponents spewing claims that have no actual basis in fact. Assemblyman Moya’s transparency legislation would remove the veil of secrecy that shrouds insurance company premiums and allow for an open and honest dialogue about the cost of construction insurance in this state.”

Source: Saratogian