150 Workers Die Each Day From Doing Their Jobs

[Jim Lane]

65. I agree. My experience is that it's a mixed bag.

I've never worked construction but as a lawyer I've represented many workers injured in on-the-job accidents.

A real-life example: Three workers are on a hanging scaffold on the outside of a building, five stories above a Manhattan street. The base of the scaffold (what they're standing on) shatters in the middle. One worker is properly tied off with a safety harness and suffers no serious injury. The second (my client) is properly tied off but is swung like a pendulum against the side of the building, suffering some injuries. The third, although safety equipment was obviously available, hasn't bothered to tie off. He falls to his death.

Another real-life example: The window should be disassembled from outside the building, by a worker in a safety lift, who can be above the window and let the pieces he removes fall harmlessly to the ground. The safety lift, however, is stuck in the mud. The construction contractor has a financial interest in getting the job done ASAP, so, instead of waiting for the lift to be available, the foreman orders my client to work on the window from a ladder, which puts him under the work area instead of over it. A heavy piece falls down prematurely, clobbers him, and leaves him with total permanent disability.

In the first case, you can chant "blame the victim" all you want. You won't change the fact that the worker should have emulated the two others and taken a moment to put on a safety harness and secure it to the side of the building. If he'd done that he wouldn't have died. Most companies do have safety people who hector the workers about following the rules, but they can't be everywhere at once.

In the second case, by contrast, the accident was completely the greedhead company's fault.

There's also a third category, in which the employer and all the employees do exactly what they ought to do, but something goes wrong anyway.

What are the relative proportions? I have no idea. All I know is that anyone who blames only one side is pushing an ideological point of view rather than genuinely trying to understand the problem.