New legal obligation for NYC construction workers in regards to Site Safety Training to reduce hard hat fatalities and injuries
New York City construction workers and their supervisors who are working on large or complex construction sites will be legally required to have a Site Safety Training Card issued by the NYC DOB Training Connect Platform.
These cards are equipped with a chip and can be scanned to validate their authenticity. This new legal requirement will take effect on February 1st 2023. Workers who have a SST card issued before January 1st 2022 have to contact the facility that provided them with training and ask them to replace their card with a new card that can only be issued through the NYC DOB Training Connect Platform.
Since 2017, after a peak in construction accident fatalities in New York City, a new construction law was adopted in an effort to reduce construction workers injuries and fatalities. The law requires every hard hat working on a New York City construction site to attend site safety training classes and to carry a card attesting that they did it. Unfortunately, while every worker is supposed to sit in classrooms for a certain amount of hours and learn about site safety, some unscrupulous contractors didn’t want to allow their workers to spend so much time sitting in classes and just issued fake cards to them. Other workers got fake cards from unscrupulous individuals and unauthorized course providers started to proliferate issuing invalid certificates to workers.