In the Bronx, a Construction Boom Takes Toll on Workers
On a weekday in September, a dozen members of Construction and Builders Local 79 gathered silently on East 208th Street in the Bronx. On the sidewalk, they lit jar candles featuring images of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
Although they didn’t know him, they were here to remember Segundo Huerta, a 48-year-old nonunion worker who died when the four-story residential building he was constructing on this street collapsed.
An Ecuadorean immigrant, he had worked in the U.S. for about 19 years, according to news reports.
The Bronx, like the rest of the city, has seen a surge in residential construction, racking up $3.5 billion of the estimated $14 billion spent in this sector last year. It currently has over 200 projects totaling 13,026 housing units underway across the borough.
But this boon for construction companies has come at a price.
Facing a shortage of skilled labor and skyrocketing material costs, contractors are increasingly turning to cheap, nonunion labor. Some cut corners while doing so. Dozens are fined each month for failing to make sure employees receive the proper safety training or to provide them with protective equipment, like boots and gloves, reports by the city’s Department of Buildings show.
With residential projects of all sizes mushrooming in the Bronx, unions and workers’ rights organizations worry that more workers might be at risk. They’re pushing for higher standards for contractors.
While the incident in Norwood is still under investigation by the Department of Buildings, a preliminary investigation determined that the third floor was overloaded with concrete masonry blocks and collapsed on Huerta.
Local 79 members believed the accident was preventable.
“If you’re certified trained, you know that you can’t put 5,000 pounds in one spot on the floor,” Barrie Smith, a business representative for Local 79, said in a phone interview.
Pioneer General Construction, the contractor for 94 East 208th Street, did not respond to a request for comment.
The tight margins and pressures of time lead many contractors to do away with basic safety guidelines, said Clifford Aikens, the president and CEO of 5 Elements West, a manufacturer for the industry.
“What’s the main thing about that world? Get the work done,” Aikens said in a phone interview.
Out of the 12 workers who died on construction sites in New York in 2017, 11 were nonunion, according to a report by the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a nonprofit.
While exact numbers are hard to come by, most observers believe the ratio of non-union to union construction workers to be about 60:40. This means that non-union sites are about eight times as dangerous as union ones.
Several nonunion workers interviewed for this story described work environments where safety rules seldom applied.
Maximilian Taberas, a 57-year-old non-union electrician, said that “nobody has the proper equipment” on most job sites he has worked at.
Carmen Verga-Rivera, a volunteer for Community Action for Safe Apartments, said that safety concerns applied to workers and future residents alike.
“When you go into these new developments, one of the things one has to ask is: how safe are these buildings?”
