That's total misattribution of cause and effect. We could build that bridge today just as fast with no loss of life. We have tie offs, sensors, harnesses, automation, power tools, helicopters, better cranes, etc.
Look at the California high speed rail debacle. The reason for its lack of progress has zero to do with worker safety. They've barely even tried to do anything. It hasn't even gotten that far.
Our unwillingness to build housing has zero to do with worker safety. Few workers die or are seriously injured building houses in places where we still build houses.
The article here is right about the disease but wrong about the causes or the cure.
Well, construction is a lot safer now. The death rate of construction workers has fallen by a factor of 5 since the 1960s in the US. It's possible those lower construction costs were at least in part due to a cavalier disregard for worker safety.
Take some time to research safety and deaths in large construction projects happening today at the scale of bridging the Golden Gate back in the 1930s. E.g. Channel tunnel - 10 deaths, Panama Canal Expansion - 7, Three Gorges Dam - 100+, Gotthard Base Tunnel - 8, Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge - 19, Istanbul Airport - 55. I'm not sure what statistics you are looking for, but construction isn't a no-risk profession even in modern times. If you want to just look at America - 3 people died at the Hard Rock Hotel construction site in New Orleans last year. Two people have died in the last two months building the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles. Two more died digging a trench in Phoenix two weeks ago.
According to Wikipedia, 5 people died building the Empire State Building. Workers dying on the job wasn't uncommon back in those days, and considering the size of the project, that's actually probably pretty good for that day and age. According to another poster here, the Freedom Tower had a whole bunch of safety incidents too and serious injuries.
Obviously, safety has gotten better over the years, but it's not like people were falling off the ESB left and right during construction.
Also, we have the benefits of modern technologies now: safety technologies, cranes, etc. It should be both faster and safer to build something that size, just like we can build cars now that are better than Model Ts in every single way. But it isn't.
It's not about pensions, and it certainly isn't about healthcare (we don't have nationalized healthcare in the US, we have a complete fucking mess). The problem is politics and bureaucracy. We just can't get stuff done like we used to.
The US Death Rate per Capita is about .8%, so let's start there.
How many is it acceptable to die on the job? Well, there's hard stats on that - About 1M people work in construction[1], and about 1000 of them died on the job last year[2]. That'd be about .1% death rate on the job. Is that good enough? Probably not, but it's where we're at and what society accepts.
If 2,000 people worked on the Golden Gate Bridge for five years, it'd be an average construction project. It was a massive undertaking, but apparently poorly documented - There's no record of worker counts[1], but we do know the number of deaths - 11, of which 10 were from a single failure of a gantry.
I genuinely don't know why there are fewer instances today, and the question at the bottom is literal rather than rhetorical. (I don't even know whether there are fewer instances today -- maybe they're just happening in less legible domains, or something.)
That said, I'm somewhat skeptical of the safety argument, which I often hear. For example, 60 workers were apparently killed during the construction of the World Trade Center[0] -- 4x more deaths than occurred during the construction of the Empire State Building. Nor is it a priori clear to me that safety and speed would necessarily be in opposition -- maybe better planning causes both more safety and more speed, for example. I'd certainly be interested in a more comprehensive investigation of this question.
I'm also somewhat doubtful of cost-of-labour explanations. Wouldn't it be rational for some organizations to pay a lot more to get people to work longer hours if that's all that's going on? (It would almost certainly be cheaper to do that than to have the project take twice as long in total.) And why did many of the instances enumerated on the page happen in relatively high cost (for the time) locations, like New York, DC, and San Francisco, rather than in cheaper places?
I do believe that state/military intervention clearly plays some role in a few, but there are certainly plenty of examples of remarkably slow military projects, and many of the projects on the page have nothing to do with the military. (Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Boeing 747, NYC Subway.)
So, I haven't found a satisfying explanation, and I'd be curious to read other analyses or diagnoses.
I said dozens because it seems credible, I didn't look anything up. It's somewhat common for construction workers to die even in the modern world, but my shock is more that it seems worse than most projects (Was it Guardian who had the story about people getting so tired they fell asleep and fell off the stadium roof?), yet most projects are for genuinely useful things like bridges and dams, not entertainment.
Wonder how much of it is not treating workers like disposable things? Look at pictures of work crews back in the 30s and you see workers eating lunch - completely unharnessed - on exposed beams 100s of feet in the air. Deaths were common on large projects.
I'd love to work construction. But every time I've mentioned it to my family they tell me about how it will destroy my knees and back, I'll lose fingers, get hearing damage, head injuries, and the pay is crap compared to the risk.
If there was decent workplace safety (my hometown is infamous for it's poor safety standards), and a good pension program where you're expected to want to quit and do something else after 10 years or so, before your body is ruined, then I'd be all about it.
My general impression is that worker safety was pretty much disregarded compared to modern standards.
A quick search turned up this piece[1] on 16 deaths around 1904 during construction of a NYC subway line. There are famous pictures such as this one of construction of high rises in New York[2] without any safety equipment whatsoever. But it was built in 14 months! All that safety gear is expensive and slows down construction. In climbing, we often joke 'no belay, no delay', because of how fast you can climb when you don't take the time to fix your ropes, etc. [3]
For further perspective, over a thousand individuals died during the construction of the transcontinental railroad. OSHA might have reduced the death count, but that comes at the expense of efficiency. Compound the endless other regulations implemented since that time, and it's surprising that anything gets built at all anymore.
My point being duke is that physically intensive jobs such as carpentry, bricklaying and other labor intensive jobs also have their own safeguards to prevent these injuries you mentioned. Not completely remove but prevent, the same way that office jobs still impact people's health.
They're required to use hats, hard hats, safety glasses, long sleeved clothing, sun screen, steel capped boots, lifting belts etc.
The things you mention do not particularly happen to everyone and even less so since safety standards have improved.
Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down."
For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.
I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
It wouldn't be that unusual for there to be deaths during a big construction project, especially in a place lacking good safety protections. So it is a reasonable question to ask.
I have an uncle who has lived for 40 years with mental disabilities and unable to drive, from an a construction site accident.
My grandfather died before reaching 60 after a series of ailments starting with a back injury suffered in the construction industry.
It is hard & dangerous work, which has gotten dramatically safer over time. It nonetheless remains hard on the body.
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