Court Opinion

ID: 9534203
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 04:37:33.977304+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:27:32.311916
License: Public Domain

Smith, J. (dissenting).
I dissent because today’s decision unwisely and unnecessarily increases the already heavy burden that Labor Law § 240 (1) places on New York property owners.
The statute says that, with exceptions not relevant here, “[a]ll contractors and owners . . . shall furnish or erect, or cause to be furnished or erected” safety devices “which shall be so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection” to workers. The duty of contractors and owners to provide “proper protection” is nondelegable (Rocovich v Consolidated Edison Co., 78 NY2d 509, 513 [1991]). Indeed, an owner cannot escape the duty imposed by the statute even by ridding itself of possession of the property; we have held that landlords of leased property are liable as owners under section 240 (1) (Coleman v City of New York, 91 NY2d 821, 823 [1997]; Gordon v Eastern Ry. Supply, 82 NY2d 555, 559-560 [1993]).
*343We have never addressed, however, the situation of a landlord that did not try to delegate responsibility for worker safety to its tenant, but retained in the lease the power to provide protection for workers—only to have the tenant ignore the lease provision. Here, the lease specifically prohibits the tenant from hiring a contractor to make any alterations in the premises without the landlord’s prior written consent. A representative of the landlord testified that if a request for consent had been made “we would want to know who the contractor was and we would want the contractor hopefully to be someone that was known and approved by the owner.” Whether such an inquiry would have prevented what happened in this case—the hiring of a contractor with unsafe equipment—will never be known, because the tenant violated the lease and never gave the landlord a chance to make the inquiry.
I do not see how the statutory goal of preventing workplace accidents is advanced by holding a landlord liable in a situation like this. What could anyone expect the landlord to do to prevent the accident, other than what it did? “The point of Labor Law § 240 (1) is to compel. . . owners to comply with the law, not to penalize them when they have done so” (Blake v Neighborhood Hous. Servs. of N.Y. City, 1 NY3d 280, 286 [2003]). The result the majority reaches effectively treats this landlord “as an insurer”—contrary to our view of the purpose of the statute as expressed in Blake (id.).
This result can be justified only by a literal, mechanical reading of the statute, to say that any “owner” is liable whenever a worker is not given proper protection, and is injured. We rejected such literalism in Abbatiello v Lancaster Studio Assoc. (3 NY3d 46 [2004]), where a cable television repairman was held to have no claim against a building owner who did not know the repairman was there, and could have done nothing about it if it had. I think we should follow the approach of Abbatiello here, where the tenant’s breach of the lease prevented the landlord from learning of the worker’s presence, rather than expand our already draconian rules of Labor Law § 240 (1) liability.
Chief Judge Kaye and Judges Ciparick, Pigott and Jones concur with Judge Graffeo; Judge Smith dissents in a separate opinion in which Judge Read concurs.
Order, insofar as appealed from, reversed, etc.