A Latino Worker, a Risky Construction Site and a Family in Mourning. Construction workers, many of them undocumented, continue to die on the job in New York City, despite safety regulations.

New York Times ^ | February 17, 2020 | Andrea Salcedo and Derek M. Norman

[karpov]

A week before the accident, Segundo Huerta’s wife said, her husband had complained to her that the boss at the Bronx construction site where he was working was pressuring his laborers, berating them for working too slowly.

Mr. Huerta’s wife, Maria Guazhco, said her husband had told her that after 17 years with the company, he would try to find another job. Nonetheless, she said, he returned to the site the next week.

“And then,” Ms. Guazhco, 39, said, “everything collapsed.”

Mr. Huerta, 46, was killed on Aug. 27 after the third floor of the building where he was working crumbled, burying and trapping his body under hundreds of pounds of rubble.

He was one of 12 people, 10 of them Latino, who died in construction-related accidents last year, according to preliminary data from the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health, a workers’ safety advocacy group, and the Department of Buildings. The number of construction-related deaths has been consistent for the past four years.

Mr. Huerta’s death reflects the dangers that persist at New York construction sites despite the reams of rules and regulations the city has imposed to protect workers, many of whom, like Mr. Huerta, are Latino and undocumented. The families left behind have little recourse to fill the financial void created by such tragedies.

From 2006 to 2016, nearly half of the workers at nonunion job sites in the city were Hispanic or Latino, compared with about 30 percent at union sites, according to Lawrence Mishel, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank. The slice of workers at nonunion sites who are Hispanic or Latino is probably more than 50 percent now, Mr. Mishel said.

Undocumented workers are less likely to have the same safeguards as other workers.

[Clemenza]

Skilled jobs remain high paid, union or not. For unskilled/semiskilled, not so much anymore, albeit still better pay than in Texas. A large number of private sector projects are no longer unionized.

[scrabblehack]

Hispanic or Latino?

Does Latino include Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian?

[raybbr]

“””” Mr. Huerta’s wife, Maria Guazhco...”

Yeah, sure. Different names but married.

[kearnyirish2]

They are probably hired by subcontractors; many projects also require 51% minority workers (including preferred racial minorities and female workers).

As much as I like Mike Rowe’s “Dirty Jobs”, the fact is that many of those jobs are filled with unskilled illegals - at least in my area (in NJ, a dozen miles west of Manhattan). Friends in the trades have lost their jobs to them, and employers have no interest in hiring Americans if they can avoid it.

At a local outdoor flea market, you can see the illegals buying tools from the idled American workers; it is a shame...