The insurance industry’s latest attack on New York’s Scaffold Law is framed as a plea for “affordability.” In reality, it is a demand for legal immunity for those who profit from dangerous construction while shifting the human and financial cost of catastrophic injuries onto workers and taxpayers.
Labor Law §240 does not create automatic or no-fault liability. It applies only in a narrow category of cases involving gravity-related hazards where owners and contractors failed to provide proper safety devices and that failure directly caused the injury. If a worker is the sole cause of the accident, the defendant wins. That is not rhetoric. It is black-letter New York appellate law applied daily in trial courts across the state.
The Scaffold Law exists for a reason that critics conspicuously avoid discussing. According to city data, there were nearly 500 construction-related injuries in 2024, while falls from heights and falling objects remain the leading causes of death and life-altering injury in construction. This statute was enacted after generations of workers were killed or crippled on unsafe scaffolds while contractors blamed the victims and treated safety as optional. The law imposes a simple and morally obvious rule: if you control the work site, you control the danger.
The proposed alternative standard, comparative negligence, does not make job sites safer. It turns safety cases into character trials of injured workers. Under that system, a worker paralyzed by a fall from an unprotected height can see their recovery slashed because a jury decides they were partially “at fault” for working on a site that lacked basic fall protection in the first place. The economic impact does not disappear. It is transferred to Medicaid, Social Security Disability, public housing, and taxpayer-funded home care. Unscrupulous developers avoid responsibility, and the public absorbs the cost of lifelong disability.
The oft-repeated claim that the Scaffold Law adds 10% to construction costs is advocacy math, not credible economics. The primary drivers of construction inflation are financing, land acquisition, materials volatility, labor shortages, delays, change orders and developer profit margins. States that weakened worker safety protections did not experience dramatic cost reductions or sudden safety improvements. What they did experience was an increase in catastrophically injured workers dependent on public assistance.
From an insurance perspective, premiums are driven by loss history and claims frequency, not by the existence of a statute. Claims frequency is driven by unsafe conditions. Safer sites produce fewer catastrophic falls. Fewer catastrophic falls reduce losses. Removing accountability does not reduce losses. It increases them while reducing incentives to prevent them.
The federal “workaround” being promoted as reform is also legally suspect. Workers on federally funded projects would be stripped of state safety protections that apply to the worker standing next to them on a privately funded job across the same scaffold. That kind of two-tiered liability system based solely on funding source raises serious federalism and equal-protection concerns. It is not rational reform. It is engineered regulatory chaos meant to shield powerful commercial landowners and insurers from real accountability.
None of this is really about affordability for working families. The main beneficiaries of weakening the Scaffold Law would be mega-developers, institutional property owners, insurance carriers and public-private megaproject sponsors. What New Yorkers would get in return is not cheaper housing. They would get more funerals, more amputations, more permanent disabilities and more people forced onto public assistance because someone with control of a dangerous site decided safety was too expensive.
The Scaffold Law does not punish safe builders. It only penalizes those who cut corners on life-saving protections in environments where gravity is unforgiving. It exists because history proved that without meaningful consequences, safety becomes negotiable. Gravity does not negotiate – and lives potentially change forever.
New York became an economic engine not by making worker deaths cheaper, but by demanding higher standards and holding those who profit from dangerous work accountable for the risks they impose. Weakening the Scaffold Law would not reduce real costs. It would reduce standards. And working people would pay that price with their bodies.
