Sydney Opera House builders reflect on historic job as the icon turns 50

2023-10-20T16:55:00-04:00

The construction of the Sydney Opera House was a famously fraught saga, but as the city’s landmark turns 50, former workers remember a quite different atmosphere on the site itself.

Trade unionists and other workers were not the only sources of labor disputes on the site, as Jørn Utzon memorably quit midway over a payment dispute on the 14-year construction project that became essentially the Brooklyn Bridge of the Southern Hemisphere when it finally opened on October 20, 1973.

A design known for its engineering breakthroughs, it also was historic in terms of the concessions made to workers, says Solidarity Online. Their execution of Utzon’s complex vision went over schedule and budget by ten years and $95 million dollars. The result, as Frank Gehry said, was “a building that changed the image of an entire country.”

“The work was precise. You can see it in the building today. Everything is perfect,” one worker told The Guardian. The BBC also has a retrospective look back in pictures here.

2021 was an increasingly deadly year for construction workers in New York

2023-02-24T14:24:00-05:00

In 2021, 12.1 per 100,000 construction workers in New York state died on the job, a 9% increase from 11.1 the year before, according to a new report from the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health. The total number of workers who died in the state increased to 61 in 2021, up from 41 in 2020, reported NYCOSH, a membership organization that represents workers, unions and health and safety professionals.

The Committee also found that one-quarter of all workplace fatalities across New York state took place on construction sites, a repeat of the figure contained in the Deadly Skyline Report for 2020. Latino workers accounted for 25.5% of the deaths recorded, keeping pace with a larger grisly national trend. Overall, an average of 53.6 workers have died on job sites each year in New York over the past decade.

The NYC Department of Buildings had the same year enacted “zero tolerance” safety sweeps resulting in nearly 1,500 stop-work orders. The reform efforts were added to recently in the form of the new Carlos’ Law, which will increase the financial penalties on employers in negligent death cases from $10,000 to $500,000 (to a maximum of $1 million). In New York City alone, where 20 workers died, some 89% of construction sites had some form of safety issue, according to a ...

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Sydney Opera House builders reflect on historic job as the icon turns 50

2021 was an increasingly deadly year for construction workers in New York