New York State's Scaffold Law

New York State has a unique provision in its Labor Law that attaches absolute liability to property owners and contractors where an owner and contractor have failed to provide any safety devices for a worker engaged in a task that entails a significant risk because of an elevation differential.

Labor Law section 240(1) provides, in pertinent part:
All contractors and owners and their agents, who contract for but do not direct or control the work, in the erection, demolition, repairing, altering, painting, cleaning, or pointing of a building or structure shall furnish or erect, or cause to be furnished or erected for the performance of such labor, scaffolding, hoists, stays, ladders, slings, hangars, blocks, pulleys, braces, irons, ropes, and other devices which shall be so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection to a person so employed.

This statute imposes a non-delegable duty upon owners and contractors to provide a safe work environment, and the consequence for breach of that duty is the imposition of strict liability. 

The Legislature’s intent in creating Labor Law section 240(1) is clear: to protect workers by placing the ultimate responsibility for safety practices at job sites where such responsibility actually belongs, on the owner and general contractor, instead of on workers, who are scarcely in a position to protect themselves from accident. 

Specifically, the statute is intended to protect against risks due in some way to relative differentials in elevation. These risks are considered to be “special hazards” and are limited to such gravity-related accidents as falling.   As the State's highest Court held: Labor Law section 240(1) was designed to prevent those types of accidents in which the scaffold, hoist, stay, ladder or other protective device proved inadequate to shield the injured worker from harm directly flowing from the application of the force of gravity to an object or person.