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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Still that way in some places I've been. Construction in places like Mexico doesn't seem to have anything like OSHA, at least anything that's having an influence. Lots of concrete cutting with unguarded blades, loose clothing, no eye protection, etc.
Or check out this one in China, forging huge flanges in the street with very little safeguards. https://youtu.be/yE8A6uMYXmw
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.
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]
#1 reason we wouldn't do things like that today: 112-154 people died during construction (number depends on if you believe that carbon monoxide poisioning during construction was purposely mis-diagnosed in order for the company to skip on paying death benefits).
I'd venture to say that health, safety,. and related regulation is the chilling effect on construction productivity here. OSHA didn't come around til the 70s but plenty of implicitly required changes came about in the mid/late 40s, for numerous industries. On top of that, specific to construction industry, my theory is that WW2 hampered or reduced the available labor workforce while those in regulatory design positions were potentially exempt from the war and thus entrenched by the time 1947 came about. I could just be talking shit but I also would place a few bucks on being right.
OSHA has 2200 employees. If you’ve been around construction you’ve probably witnessed how frequent osha violations are. Most people don’t even know hardly any of the regulations. I’d be shocked if even 1/4 of the construction industry was osha compliant half the time.
The best is seeing the guy on the jackhammer with his ppe hanging around his neck.
It’s like a cultural thing. Most guys in construction don’t seem to care at all. And osha has very little influence. Think of the number of workplaces, factories, and construction sites around the country compared to how many inspectors there are…
Speaking of deaths, people too often focus on benefits and not safety. Even in post-war America, a lot of good men died during that industrial boom. An old co-worker of mine was a shift supervisor in a steel mill and he had horror-stories, and this was in a union shop.
These jobs involve a scale of machinery that makes the human body look like a slug in an elephant stampede. The physics of the situation are horribly unforgiving. Without anyone pulling for safety standards, a heavy industrial facility can be a literal and figurative meat-grinder.
That's kind of moving the goal-posts; we were discussing construction, which, at least in my experience, has a lot less OSHA oversight. Probably it is different in more unionized sectors as well; my experience is decidedly not - smaller logging, construction and power generation companies, where you often don't have the equipment to really do things correctly, for whatever reason, but it has to get done, and so brute strength and ignorance are resorted to.
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