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The New York City Department of Buildings announced that it is pushing back the first major construction safety training deadline to the summer of 2019.
Before this change, all construction workers were required to complete at least 30 hours of construction safety training by December of this year. The Department of Buildings reportedly started considering pushing back this deadline by six months earlier this week, and announced the official change at a Building Trades Employers’ Association breakfast. Now, both workers and supervisors have until June 2019 to complete those 30 hours of training.
“This doesn’t change the end result in terms of what the legislation was seeking,” said Louis Coletti, head of the Building Trades Employers’ Association. “But it provides a more reasoned approach on how to get there in a way that won’t be disruptive.”
According to officials, a key reason this change was made was due to a shortage of approved contractors and third-party instructors. Contractors noted that in the month following the implementation of this new law, the limited number of people who could lead the required training created a bottleneck that made it difficult to make sure that every worker could meet the 30-hour requirement by the December deadline. This would have resulted in fines for sites employing untrained workers and/or costly delays to projects.
This delay to the initial deadline does not affect the final deadline for worker training, which requires all construction workers to complete 40 hours of training by September 2020.
Related Posts:
- What You Need to Know About the New Site Safety Training Guidelines
- NYC Department of Buildings Announces Mandatory 40 Hours of Training for Workers
- Controversial New Bill Requiring Safety Training for Construction Workers Passed Into Law
