{"id":432244,"date":"2025-12-08T01:53:10","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/432244\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T01:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T01:53:10","slug":"slap-nys-greedy-ambulance-chasers-rein-in-the-scaffold-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/432244\/","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

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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":3,"featured_media":432245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5122],"tags":[5229,9886,4691,5173,7337,5371,379,30091,405,403,5226,5225,5228,5227,1269,45655,39749,67,586,132,5230,68,2969,52474,5301],"class_list":{"0":"post-432244","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-construction","10":"tag-editorial","11":"tag-infrastructure","12":"tag-insurance","13":"tag-kathy-hochul","14":"tag-lawsuit","15":"tag-lawyers","16":"tag-new-york","17":"tag-new-york-city","18":"tag-newyork","19":"tag-newyorkcity","20":"tag-ny","21":"tag-nyc","22":"tag-opinion","23":"tag-scaffold-law","24":"tag-unions","25":"tag-united-states","26":"tag-united-states-of-america","27":"tag-unitedstates","28":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","29":"tag-us","30":"tag-usa","31":"tag-workplace-injuries","32":"tag-zohran-mamdani"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115681454306084473","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=432244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/432244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/432245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=432244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=432244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=432244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}