{"id":63774,"date":"2025-12-08T01:50:26","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:50:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/63774\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T01:50:26","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:50:26","slug":"slap-nys-greedy-ambulance-chasers-rein-in-the-scaffold-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/63774\/","title":{"rendered":"Slap NY’s greedy ambulance chasers: Rein in the ‘Scaffold Law’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Any New York leader who cares about \u201caffordability\u201d will cheer Rep. Nick Langworthy\u2019s effort to rein in the state\u2019s obscene \u201cScaffold Law.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

President Donald Trump, and anyone who\u2019s built anything in the Empire State, knows how the 140-year-old law makes construction projects more expensive \u2014 and less viable.<\/p>\n

Ever since 1885, this statute has made contractors and property owners 100% liable for workers\u2019 \u201cgravity-related\u201d injuries even when they\u2019re almost entirely the fault of the workers\u2019 themselves.<\/p>\n

That \u201cabsolute liability\u201d rule sends insurance premiums through the roof, <\/a>adding as much as 10% to construction costs.<\/p>\n

Every other state uses a different \u201ccomparative negligence\u201d standard \u2014 meaning parties share liability in proportion to their responsibility for the injury.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n

And now Langworthy (R-NY) is pushing a workaround for projects that use federal funds.<\/p>\n

His bill would send lawsuits over injuries on federally funded jobs to federal courts, where \u201ccomparative negligence\u201d holds.<\/p>\n

Even uber-liberal states like California and Illinois don\u2019t impose the \u201cabsolute liability\u201d standard; Illinois became the last state in the union to scrap that approach \u2014 decades ago.<\/p>\n

Taxpayers could save billions on federally backed projects like the Hudson River Gateway project and the Port Authority Bus Terminal.<\/p>\n

The expected total price tag for federally funded work in New York over just the next five years is about $80 billion; if the Scaffold Law accounts for 10% of those costs, that\u2019s $8 billon saved.<\/p>\n

Albany should have ditched the Scaffold Law <\/a>long ago: In New York, a worker who hurts himself while drunk or ignoring safety rules can make his bosses entirely responsible \u2014 even if the worker was 99.9% responsible.<\/p>\n

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That\u2019s not just unfair; it makes projects needlessly costly, sometimes so much so that they don\u2019t get built.<\/p>\n

But state lawmakers heed the demands of trial lawyers and unions to resist commonsense reform. <\/p>\n

Perhaps with a push from New York\u2019s most famous developer, Congress will attach Longworthy\u2019s fix to some must-pass bill \u2014 and maybe even embarrass Albany into at last ending Scaffold Law insanity.<\/p>\n

Now that would be a true boon to \u201caffordability.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Any New York leader who cares about \u201caffordability\u201d will cheer Rep. Nick Langworthy\u2019s effort to rein in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":63775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,1527,304,5865,13319,426,3100,9340,9,24,63,299,33491,3555,8744,82],"class_list":["post-63774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-construction","tag-editorial","tag-infrastructure","tag-insurance","tag-kathy-hochul","tag-lawsuit","tag-lawyers","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-opinion","tag-scaffold-law","tag-unions","tag-workplace-injuries","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}