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When Raymond Jara, 25, fell to his death at a construction site near Union Square, the Department of Buildings reacted immediately, forming the Scaffold Worker Safety Taskforce which produced and implemented a series of recommendations on worker safety. The unions, primarily the Laborers' Union, and the Builders' Association, were heavily consulted and agreed to the changes. A few voices, like Councilor Rosie Mendez of District 2, felt it wasn't enough. But no one felt that the changes went too far.

That is because the truth is somewhere in the middle. The unions and the Builders' Association have close professional relations with the Department of Buildings, and don't seek large-scale regulations that would put undue burden on them. But they do accept piecemeal changes whose costs they can absorb in this ongoing boom market, but which can be detrimental to non-union labor working at much lower margins - the source of most of New York City's construction accidents and deaths. After all, non-union labor is the competition.

"We already train our workers regularly at our facility in Queens," said Kieran O'Sullivan of the Laborers' local 18A in Manhattan. "We spend millions of dollars on safety training. [Most] construction accidents happen at non-union sites," he said.

While their strategies may change as market conditions in New York worsen, today the relationship between the Department of Buildings and the Builders and Labourers
is the deciding factor in how safety regulations are used to squeeze out non-union work for the benefit of union workers and a handful of large developers.