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You Are on Comp. In New York That Is Rarely the Whole Recovery.
If you were hurt on a New York construction site, there is a good chance you have a second claim nobody has told you about.
Workers' compensation is the only thing you can collect from your employer. It is not the only thing you can collect.
The building owner, the general contractor, the construction manager, and the other trades on the job are separate companies, and Labor Law 240 and 241 are aimed straight at them.
That case pays what comp does not: pain and suffering, your full wages instead of the capped benefit, and the benefit hours you stop accruing the day you stop working.
For a tradesperson in the middle of a career, the lost pension and annuity contributions alone can outrun the medical bills.
Call (888) 713-6653 for a free review of whether you have a claim beyond comp. You Win or It's Free.
- Filing a lawsuit does not stop your comp benefits
- The suit is against the owner and GC, not against your employer
- Free Legal Evaluation - You Pay Nothing Unless We Win
The Money Comp Was Never Built to Replace
Comp pays your authorized medical treatment and roughly two-thirds of your average weekly wage, up to a state maximum. For a journeyman on a New York scale, that maximum arrives fast.
Here is what it does not pay, and what an injured tradesperson actually loses:
- Pain and suffering. Not a dollar of it, in any case, ever.
- Wages above the weekly cap. The gap between your real check and the benefit is yours to absorb.
- Overtime and premium time you were working and would have kept working.
- Benefit hours. Welfare fund, pension credits, annuity contributions, and vacation fund hours all stop accruing when you stop working. Years off the job can move your retirement.
- Your future in the trade. If you cannot go back to the tools, comp does not measure the career.
- Loss of consortium for your spouse.
- Home modification, adaptive equipment, and long-term attendant care beyond authorized treatment.
The benefit-hours item is the one most people underestimate, and it is a documented, provable number. Fund records show contribution rates and hours. An economist can project what a multi-year absence costs across a career. That is a real component of a real case, not an argument.
Who Told You Comp Was It
Usually it is not a lawyer. It is a foreman, a safety manager, a coworker who got hurt in 2019, or a business agent giving a straight answer to the wrong question.
Comp is exclusive against your employer. It says nothing about the owner of the building, the GC running the job, or the trade that created the hazard.
There is one statutory qualifier, and it is the grave injury rule in Workers' Compensation Law § 11, which works differently from the way most workers are told it works.
Sometimes it comes from a comp attorney who handles comp and does not handle construction litigation. That is not bad faith, and it still costs a worker the larger half of his case if nobody looks at the third-party side.
The test is simple enough to run in one conversation. If any company other than your own employer owned the property, ran the site, supplied the equipment, or created the condition that hurt you, there is a claim to evaluate.
Nobody on that site is going to tell you about the second case. Mostly not because they are hiding it, but because it is not their job to know. The most expensive sentence in New York construction is 'you're on comp, that's your remedy.' Many New York construction cases involve more than a workers' compensation claim. We help seriously injured workers identify every available path to compensation.
Why Union Members Often Have the Strongest Third-Party Cases
Being union does not create the claim. It frequently makes the claim easier to prove.
Your Training Records Kill the Best Defense
The main defense to a Scaffold Law claim is that the worker was the sole proximate cause of his own accident, which requires showing he ignored an available and adequate safety device for no good reason. Apprenticeship records, certifications, and documented safety training establish that you knew the correct method and would have used it if the equipment had been there. Trained workers do not read as reckless. That defense is broken down on our page about the sole proximate cause and recalcitrant worker defenses.
There Are Witnesses Who Will Talk
Stewards, safety committee members, and coworkers with job security are more willing to describe a jobsite honestly than workers who fear losing the next call. On non-union work, witnesses go quiet fast.
The Paperwork Exists
Union projects tend to have site safety plans, toolbox talk records, sign-in sheets, and daily reports that were actually kept. Certified payroll on public work identifies who was on the floor. That documentation is what a Labor Law case is built from.
The Wage Loss Is Provable to the Dollar
Collective bargaining agreements set the rate. Fund records show contributions. There is no argument about what you would have earned, which removes the defense's favorite way to shrink an earnings claim.
None of this means non-union workers are without a case. The opposite is true, and the numbers say so. Of the New York State construction fatalities OSHA investigated in 2024, 81 percent of the workers who died were non-union.[1] The least protected sites produce the most serious injuries, and those workers have the same Labor Law rights. They just have to be helped to prove them.
Three Things Workers Ask Before They Call
Will this cost me my comp? No. Filing the lawsuit does not stop your benefits. What requires care is the resolution, because the comp carrier holds a lien on the recovery and its consent matters when a case settles. That is a coordination issue we handle, not a reason to skip the claim.
Am I suing the guys I work with? No. The defendants are the property owner, the general contractor, the construction manager, and other contractors. Your employer is generally not in the case at all, because comp bars claims against it except in narrow circumstances.
Will it follow me on the book? Retaliation for filing a workers' compensation claim is prohibited under New York law, and the lawsuit is against companies that are not your employer. Most of our clients in these cases are too badly hurt to return to the same trade, which is exactly why the third-party claim matters so much.
The Accidents That Produce These Claims
Any jobsite injury caused by someone other than your own employer is worth reviewing. The ones we see most:
- Falls from scaffolds, ladders, and roofs, the core Labor Law 240(1) cases
- Falls through unguarded floor openings, shafts, and skylights
- Struck by falling material, tools, or a dropped load
- Crane, hoist, and rigging failures
- Trench collapse and excavation cave-ins
- Electrocution and arc flash burns from circuits that were never locked out
- Struck by equipment, including lifts, forklifts, and vehicles on site
- Collapses of formwork, shoring, scaffolds, and structures
- Defective equipment, where a manufacturer or lessor is also liable
The injuries that follow are the ones that end careers: spinal fractures and cord injury, traumatic brain injury, crush injuries and amputations, complex fractures requiring hardware, severe burns, and the shoulder and knee injuries that quietly make it impossible to keep working the tools.
Occupational disease follows the same two-track structure without an accident date at all, which is how a countertop fabricator ends up with both a comp claim and a third-party case. That is the subject of our page on engineered stone silicosis.
What a Third-Party Claim Can Recover for a Tradesperson
The lawsuit covers the categories comp refuses, and New York does not cap compensatory damages in an injury case.
The point of the case is to put a number on everything the injury actually took, including the parts that do not appear on a medical bill.
- Past and future medical care, including surgeries, hardware, injections, and revision procedures
- Full lost earnings, including overtime, rather than the capped weekly benefit
- Lost future earning capacity measured against your actual trade rate
- Lost pension credits, annuity contributions, welfare and vacation fund hours
- Pain and suffering, past and future
- Disfigurement and scarring
- Loss of enjoyment of life
- Loss of consortium for your spouse
- Wrongful death and conscious pain and suffering where a worker was killed
Value depends on permanence, on whether liability runs through Labor Law 240's absolute liability or a fault-based theory, and on the insurance layers behind the owner and general contractor. Typical ranges are on our page about construction accident settlement amounts, and the no-cap rule is explained on our page about whether New York caps injury damages.
What Happens to Your Comp Case When the Lawsuit Resolves
The comp carrier that paid your benefits gets repaid out of the third-party recovery. That is the lien, and it is the part workers worry about most.
It is smaller than the face number. The carrier must bear its equitable share of the attorney's fees and costs that produced the recovery it is benefiting from, which is calculated rather than assumed. After the net is paid, the carrier generally takes a credit against future benefits until the credit is used, which is why the settlement figure has to be evaluated against what you would otherwise have collected.
The rule that actually causes damage is consent. Settling a third-party case for less than the benefits paid or payable, without the carrier's written consent or a court-approved compromise, can result in your benefits being disallowed. This is why the two files are run together from the start, and never signed off separately. The mechanics are covered in depth on our page about Labor Law claims and workers' compensation.
Why the First Weeks Decide a Construction Case
The work that decides a construction case happens in the first weeks: preserving the ladder, scaffold, harness, or lift; demanding the site safety plan and daily reports before they are cleaned up; identifying every company on the job; and calendaring any public-entity notice deadline, which on a City, MTA, or School Construction Authority project can be as short as 90 days.
Our firm has handled more than 40,000 injury cases and recovered over $100 million, with a 98 percent recovery rate. Our attorneys have been recognized by Best Lawyers in America, Super Lawyers, the Million Dollar Advocates Forum, and the National Trial Lawyers, and we work New York Labor Law cases from an office at 305 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.
How we work with an injured tradesperson: the consultation is free and you owe nothing unless we recover; we come to the hospital or the house when you cannot travel; we coordinate with your comp attorney rather than compete with them; and your immigration status does not bar a Labor Law claim in New York, which matters on the sites where these injuries concentrate.
We are also selective, and we say so honestly. If the facts do not support a third-party claim, we will tell you in the first conversation instead of opening a file that goes nowhere.
If Your Accident Was on a Public Job, the Clock Is Much Shorter
A private jobsite gives you three years to file. A public one can give you 90 days to serve a notice of claim. And a small residential job can remove the Labor Law claim altogether, which is what our page on the homeowner exemption covers.
City work, School Construction Authority projects, MTA and transit jobs, NYCHA buildings, Port Authority facilities, and state agency work all carry notice requirements, and the suit itself is generally due within one year and 90 days. Almost every water and transit tunnel in the state is publicly owned, which is why a sandhog or tunnel worker is on the short calendar from the day of the accident.
Nobody hands an injured worker that information at the hospital. The paperwork you get covers comp, and the notice deadline runs quietly in the background while you are still figuring out whether you will walk normally again.
Which entities trigger it, and what each one requires, is on our page about the notice of claim deadlines on a public job.