Christian Ginesi had worked for G-Tech Associates LLC for about a month when he clocked in on May 5, 2015. G-Tech installs, maintains, and repairs elevators in New York and New Jersey, and the work made Ginesi nervous — scared, even, as he told friends. The 25-year-old Air Force veteran even went so far as to say he’d felt safer while doing three tours of duty in the Middle East.
That Tuesday was Ginesi’s and G-Tech’s second day on the job at 301 West 46th Street, the site of what would become the 31-floor Riu Plaza New York Times Square Hotel. In spring 2015, New York City was — and still is, for that matter — in the middle of a massive construction boom. According to the New York Building Congress, the value of construction starts in the five-year period from 2013 to 2017 topped $150 billion. And 2015 was the high point, accounting for nearly 81,000,000 gross square feet of new buildings throughout the five boroughs.
For Ginesi, though, the glut of construction work offered an opportunity to gain a foothold back in civilian life. So, despite his trepidation, he boarded a temporary lift with a coworker and rode it up more than 20 floors, where the pair began installing elevator door frames. At a little after noon, though, the lift — which a lawsuit filed by Ginesi’s mother claims was wired with “unsafe flexible cords” — stalled five feet above the 24th floor. With no other options for getting down, Ginesi and his coworker decided to jump to the landing below. The coworker made it safely, but Ginesi lost his balance as he landed, falling backward and down the length of the shaft to the basement. He was pronounced dead at Bellevue Hospital less than an hour later.
Despite the gruesome details, anyone in New York not directly touched by the incident could be forgiven for having lost track of it amidst the rest of the casualties that piled up on New York City construction sites that year. Ginesi’s death — the blame for which was still being litigated in a civil proceeding in fall 2018 — was just one of 12 in 2015 and part of a three-year epidemic that saw 36 construction workers die through the end of 2017.
As the executive director of the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH), Charlene Obernauer finds it hard to accept any workplace casualties, but she had an exceptionally difficult time stomaching what happened on job sites in the five boroughs between 2015 and 2017.
The city had endured a similar rash of 31 construction-related deaths between 2007 and 2008. But after passage of a new law requiring workers on projects taller than 10 stories or with a footprint larger than 100,000 square feet to complete an OSHA 10-hour safety training program, those numbers plummeted to just three in 2009. Obernauer is cautious not to attribute the drop directly to the increased training, but she won’t say it wasn’t related, either. “We’ve done a lot of studies that have shown training is an effective way to reduce injuries and incidents of different kinds on the job,” she says.
Which is why, as the numbers started to climb again, Obernauer and NYCOSH decided to push for an even more comprehensive safety training law aimed at saving workers in New York City from the kind of conditions that made Christian Ginesi fear for his life and that led to his death. What they didn’t bargain for, though, was the logistical hurdles and public blowback that have dogged the law almost since its inception.
Crazy Train
Introduced in January 2017 and signed into law that September, Local Law 196 is straightforward in theory — increase safety by mandating more safety training — but much less so in practice. “There has been a lot of confusion,” says Jennifer Loyd, an attorney from the firm Litchfield Cavo who has experience in construction litigation and has reviewed the law.
For starters, there’s whom it applies to. And according to the New York Department of Buildings (DOB), which enforces Local Law 196, that’s any worker on a job site that requires a site safety plan. While “a job site that requires a site safety plan” is defined by the DOB (it’s complicated, but in general it means most major construction and demolition sites) “worker” isn’t. Which, some in the industry believe, could complicate enforcement — or, for that matter, litigation, if a worker dies and he or she didn’t receive the training.
“They’re creating a situation where employers will be asking themselves, ‘Should this person be trained? Shouldn’t they be trained?’” says Peter Simon, a certified safety professional with Total Safety Consulting, which is located just west of the city in Bayonne, N.J. “And who knows if an inspector will show up on a site and just make up a definition for what a worker is. It’s just not a good situation.” (While it’s true that the law doesn’t define that term specifically, a DOB spokesperson points out that the department has been clear about who isn’t covered, including delivery people, architects, and engineers.)
Then there are the training requirements themselves. As of May 1, 2018, all affected workers were expected to have completed the OSHA 10-hour training module. Simple enough, given that many in New York City’s construction industry already had that training, thanks to the law from a decade earlier. (Of course, anyone who got that training more than five years earlier needed a refresher.)
Things will get trickier this summer. Those who already have an OSHA 10 card can supplement it with an eight-hour class on fall prevention, another eight-hour class on site safety management, and a four-hour class on scaffold use. They can just take OSHA 30-hour training, or they’ll be compliant if they’ve completed an approved 100-hour training program, most likely through a union. (More on that later.)
We’re not done yet. Finally, in fall 2020 they’ll need the OSHA 10-hour, plus eight hours of fall prevention, eight hours of site safety management, four hours of scaffold use, four hours of general electives, four hours of specialized electives, and two hours of drug and alcohol awareness; or the OSHA 30, plus eight hours of fall prevention, and two hours of drug and alcohol awareness; or the approved 100-hour training program. (There are additional requirements for supervisors.)
Put simply, it’s a lot of classroom time. Even Simon, who makes his living administering safety training, wonders if it’s overkill. “More safety is good, but if it becomes too much, and you’re preventing people from actually doing construction, you’ve killed the golden goose,” he says. “It seems like they jumped off the cliff and went into the deep end.”
Wired for Safety
Generally speaking, though, the electrical industry in New York City has approved of Local Law 196. The Joint Industry Board of the Electrical Industry (JIB) and the Association of Electrical Contractors — both affiliated with IBEW Local 3 — submitted letters of support to the city council in January 2017 while it deliberated the law. And — again, generally speaking — the union and its member contractors still approve of the law nearly two years later. “We agree with the idea of training to create a safer construction workforce in the city,” says Humberto Restrepo, executive director of the JIB.
In fact, Restrepo and the IBEW preferred an earlier proposed version of the law that required even more training. From the union’s perspective, the nearly 9,000 electricians who are currently in the field and have gone through its apprenticeship program have spent more than enough time studying safety to meet the DOB’s 100-hour requirement. (This would mean that those who completed it in the last five years would not be required to complete any additional training now to comply with the law.)
Nick Campisano, who owns Campisano Electric, an open-shop contracting firm that does commercial/industrial work in New Jersey and New York, isn’t crazy about Local Law 196 in the first place. “How much regulation is enough?” he asks with a sigh. “When does it stop?”
Campisano has been in business for 34 years, and he had no problem with New York’s OSHA 10 requirement that came down in 2008. Local Law 196, though? He thinks its placing too large of a burden on both him and his crew. As an independent, nonunion contractor, he’ll end up footing the bill for bringing his 13 electricians into compliance, which, based on prices quoted by some training companies, could cost him as much as $500 per person.
There’s the time commitment to consider, too — and that cost will be borne by his workers. Who wants to have to get off work and then spend the rest of the night in class? Or worse: What if night classes just aren’t an option, and they have to take time off work?
As much as he may disagree with the law, though, he knows he doesn’t have much choice in the matter. Despite being licensed to work in New Jersey, he’s not about to abandon the New York market, and, well, a law is a law. “Safety training is never bad,” Campisano says. “The more training people have, the better off they are. I know I’m contradicting myself, but it’s true. It’s just the time constraints and the cost factor that make this so difficult.”
Better Late Than Never?
Union or nonunion, one thing most everyone in the electrical trade will agree on is that the DOB’s original time line for implementation was aggressive: Until a last-second capitulation by the department, workers were expected to have their OSHA 30 by Dec. 1, 2018, which, given the nature of the construction trades, was a big ask. “Our industry tends to procrastinate until the 11th hour,” says Peter Simon of Total Safety Consulting. “They’re just very resistant to change.”
There was a logistical element, too. In March 2018, the New York Electrical Contractors Association (NYECA), which is also affiliated with IBEW Local 3, submitted testimony to the DOB spelling out the challenges of bringing all its member electricians into compliance.
The law allows for workers to take much of the training online, through proctored classes that can confirm the identity of the attendees. Certain classes, though, like those related to scaffolding and fall prevention must be taken in person. “Even if the JIB allowed for perfect attendance at a four-hour scaffolding class for 40 members, this would require 300 different classes,” wrote Peter Rescigno, the NYECA’s director of government affairs. “I would like to suggest that more time, up to four years, be allotted for any training requirement that cannot be accomplished online.”
Few believed the DOB would make a change that drastic, but a provision in the law allowed for extending the Dec. 1 deadline to June 1, 2019 if the department decided there weren’t enough course providers to allow all affected workers to comply. And that’s exactly what happened.
But it wasn’t necessarily because of a lack of course providers. On Nov. 7, 2018, the DOB announced it would be pushing its December 1 deadline for the OSHA 30 requirement in order “to give city construction workers more time to get the training they need to stay safe on the job.” Despite how tight the original timeline was, though, the providers seemed to be ready to go. As of mid-October, Charlene Obernauer of NYCOSH, Humberto Restrepo of JIB, Total Safety Consulting’s Peter Simon, and representatives of a handful of other training organizations said the DOB hadn’t approved a single provider’s curriculum. Additionally, the IBEW’s curriculum hadn’t been approved for the 100-hour training requirement, either. (At the time, a DOB spokesperson wouldn’t comment on the approval process.)
In a city where construction-related fatalities have become all too common, a delay of even a day might seem like too much. But, as Obernauer points out, rolling out a program this large in a city the size of New York takes time. “I’m not going to defend administrative delays, because obviously we want this to be in implementation now,” she says. “But sometimes we overestimate how quickly something can get done.”
Halverson is a freelance writer based in Seattle. He can be reached at [email protected].