Two cases before the high court prompted the decision.

In one of them, Gorgonio Balbuena, a construction worker originally from Mexico, suffered multiple skull fractures in April 2000 when he fell off a ramp at a construction site in Manhattan while pushing a wheelbarrow. Balbuena presented evidence that he can no longer work due to his injuries. He filed a personal injury lawsuit against the owners of the property, who then sued his employer, Taman Management Corp.

Similarly, Stanislaw Majlinger, a construction worker from Poland, was injured in January 2001 when the scaffold he was working on some 15 feet above ground collapsed. He also sued his employer for compensation and lost wages.

The New York court heard both cases together. The Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the workers in both cases, stating that New York State labor law “applies to all workers in qualifying employment situations—regardless of immigration status.”

A lower court had ruled that Balbuena was entitled to future lost wages resulting from his injury, but that he “should be compensated with what he could have earned in his native Mexico,” said the February 22 New York Sun. The Court of Appeals later ruled that Balbuena was entitled to “lost American wages.” Lawyers representing Taman Management argued unsuccessfully that Balbuena should not receive future lost wages because he was working “illegally” in the United States.

“New York’s booming construction industry has given rise to an explosion of unsafe, even deadly, job sites,” said an editorial in the March 11 Daily News. “From 2001 to 2005, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration recorded 68 ‘catastrophic’ construction accidents in the city, ‘catastrophic’ meaning a worker died or at least three were seriously hurt.

“Mining OSHA data, the New York State Trial Lawyers Association found that such catastrophes happen predominantly on smaller jobs, many of them nonunion, rather than on major skyscraper projects,” the News said. “In 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, contractors with fewer than 20 workers employed 38% of laborers but accounted for 56% of deaths…. Deaths like these keep happening because there’s virtually no enforcement of building rules and no penalty for violating them. In the metropolitan area, OSHA averaged 2.3 job site visits a day in 2004; many contractors haven’t been inspected in a decade.”

In 2004, 27 construction workers died on job sites in New York City, an increase of 29 percent over the previous year. The jump was largely because of falls and other “accidents” on construction sites. The latest casualty was Tony Duncan, a 47-year-old building worker killed March 7 when a foundation wall he was working on at a Brooklyn site collapsed.
 
 
Related articles:
Oppose employers’ immigration ‘reform’!
Unionize all workers, native- and foreign-born
Over 100,000 rally in Chicago against House immigration bill
McCain-Kennedy ‘guest worker’ bill helps bosses keep pool of labor for superexploitation
House bill criminalizes undocumented workers
D.C. protesters: ‘Immigrants are not criminals’  
 
 
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