As unions decline, construction workers are dying at
alarming rates.
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| Trump as a youth, overseeing construction work loaded with workplace hazards |
Wall Streeters actually have a
ready response for impertinent questions like this: We deserve the big bucks,
they’ll tell you, because we take risks.
Truth be told, risk-takers do
abound in the canyons of Manhattan. But to see them, you have to lift your line
of sight off street level — and beyond the corner offices of Wall Street’s
high-finance movers and shakers.
You have to look skyward, up
into the “high steel” world of construction workers continually adding new
towers to the city’s skyline.
These workers risk life and limb
every day — and don’t get anywhere near the reward that those “risk-taking”
power suits are grabbing.
How risky has construction work in New York become? Over the
past two years, 31 construction workers in the city have died. Between 2011 and
2015, the city’s Department of Buildings reports, instances of on-the-job
construction injuries climbed 250 percent.
But New York hardly counts as an
isolated example. In 2014, the latest year with full stats, 899 construction workers
nationwide died from fatal work injuries, a 9 percent increase
over the year before.
Why so much carnage in construction? Some of the same factors that make Wall Streeters fabulously rich are making construction work tragically unsafe.
Start with the steady erosion of
America’s unions.
Fewer construction workers today
carry union cards, and this declining union presence has severe consequences
for safety. Construction unions have traditionally run well-regarded safety
training programs, and they give individual workers the clout they need to
challenge hazardous working conditions.
Without unions, workers in
construction regularly find themselves both inadequately trained and forced to
labor in situations that could — and do — kill them. Of the 31 New York
construction workers who’ve perished on the job over the last two years, 29
have died working on nonunion job sites.
Unfortunately, even union sites
have become more dangerous, as huge national construction companies have come
to dominate what used to be a small-business sector.
In years past, local unions
could bargain with modest-sized construction contractors and not feel
overmatched. Not anymore. Unions know that if they challenge today’s
construction giants too strenuously on safety, construction work will flow even
faster to nonunion operations.
And what about OSHA, the federal
agency that’s supposed to protect the job safety of America’s working people?
The anti-government and
anti-regulation hysteria of recent decades has left OSHA woefully understaffed.
Chronic budget squeezes have trimmed the ranks of OSHA job-site inspectors down
to about 2,200 — or approximately one compliance officer for every 59,000 American
workers.
What could turn this situation
around? We need stronger safety regulations, for starters, and a stronger OSHA
to enforce them. We need public policies that give all workers a shot at
gaining effective union representation.
We need, in other words,
everything that the new Trump administration isn’t planning to deliver. Trump
has already put the kibosh on any new hires at OSHA and announced plans to cut existing federal regulations — on
workplace safety and everything else — by 75 percent.
More carnage is coming — unless
we start making attacks on job safety politically unsafe.
Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate
fellow, co-edits Inequality.org. His latest book is The Rich
Don’t Always Win. Distributed by OtherWords.org.
