October 26, 2015

Rick Chandler
Commissioner
New York City Department of Buildings
280 Broadway, 7th Floor
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mr. Chandler:

We are writing to express our concern regarding the recent news of workers being arrested for
possession of fake OSHA cards (Daily News, October 26, 2015).
The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health (NYCOSH) uses training, education and
advocacy to improve health and safety conditions in our workplaces, our communities and environment.
NYCOSH trained 17,000 workers last year and has been invested in the maintenance of safe construction
sites since its founding in 1979. NYCOSH was a member of the Scaffold Safety Task Force implemented
by the previous administration during a similar rise in construction fatalities. While many excellent
recommendations came out of this task force, industry representatives, union leaders, and occupational
safety and health advocates alike have never found penalizing individuals to be an effective strategy to
fostering safer working conditions.
According to the article,
The sweep carried out by the Department of Investigation and the Buildings Department comes
as construction fatalities in New York City jumped to 18 in the last federal fiscal year, up from 12 the
year before. The latest arrests took place Oct. 17 with five workers led away in handcuffs at two sites
where housing is going up in Queens and the Bronx. Members of DOI, the Buildings Department and
NYPD detectives arrested the five for possessing what they say are fake OSHA cards.

There is no doubt that rising numbers of workers dying on construction sites should cause concern and
require action from the city, especially given that half of the fatalities in 2012 were of immigrant
workers in New York, and that the number of Latino fatalities in construction continues to rise
nationally, according to NYCOSHs 2015 Report, The Price of Life. However, arresting workers is a shortsighted and misguided approach, which will likely have the unintended consequence of making working
conditions more, rather than less, dangerous for New York City construction workers.
Employers/contractors have the sole legal responsibility of protecting worker health and safety on the
job and they also have the power on the ground to ensure that this happens. Whether a worker is
trained or not, he or she will not be able to implement changes to conditions on the ground, in a trench,
or on a scaffold, if the employer does not care about worker safety. While employers are quick to blame

workers whenever there is an accident, the city should know better than to buy into this argument, and
needs to direct its investigative resources at the responsible party, the contractors.
However, if workers know that they will be arrested by Department of Buildings and NYPD, they are not
likely to cooperate with any investigations into contractor health and safety. Workers will not trust the
Department of Buildings or see it as a resource, when it criminalizes rather than protect them. Parading
workers out of a job site in handcuffs is a sure way to destroy the trust of a community of workers
that can take years to rebuild.
Finally, the truth is that OSHA 10 trainings, while needed by workers in order to have a job, are not
remotely sufficient to guarantee worker safety. Robust enforcement efforts should utilize existing
criminal statutes to arrest criminal contractors who knowingly endanger workers lives through their
disregard of health and safety standards. In addition, effective enforcement requires building
partnerships and creating strategies collaboratively, with the community organizations, workers
centers, and unions that reach these workers on a daily basis.
We stand ready to work with the city to develop effective strategies to protect workers lives on the job.
One more fatality is one too many. We ask that your agencies reconsider this approach, and work
together with us and our community partners in order to protect workers lives. Please provide a written
response on the agencys strategy by Friday, October 30th, 2015.

Sincerely,

Charlene Obernauer
Executive Director

Cc:
Mayor Bill De Blasio