Most injured workers are told the same thing: you got hurt on the job, so you file workers' compensation, and that is the end of it. In New York that is wrong, and the difference is often enormous.
Attorney Jordan Stern handles your case personally, from the first call through the resolution. He has represented injured New Yorkers for over 30 years, across Nassau and Suffolk County, from the firm's office in Freeport.
Free consultation. No fee unless we recover money for you.
Isn't workers' compensation my only option?
Only as against your employer.
Workers' compensation is the exclusive remedy against the company that employed you, and it pays medical treatment and a portion of lost wages without anyone proving fault. What it does not pay is anything for pain and suffering, and it is usually a fraction of what a serious injury actually costs.
New York gives construction workers a second, separate claim — against the property owner and the general contractor, who are almost never your employer. That claim is not limited the way compensation is, and it does not depend on whether your employer carried insurance. Both proceed at the same time.
If the third-party case succeeds, the compensation carrier will assert a lien against the recovery. Handling that lien is part of the work, and it is one of the reasons the two claims should not be run separately by people who are not talking to each other.
What do I need to do about the comp claim right now?
Report the injury to your employer, in writing, and do it promptly. New York requires written notice within 30 days of the accident. (Workers' Compensation Law § 18) A late notice can sometimes be excused, but it hands the carrier a defense you do not want to be arguing about while you are trying to get treatment authorized.
Separately, the claim itself — the C-3 form filed with the Workers' Compensation Board — is generally due within two years. (WCL § 28)
Nothing on this page is a reason to delay any of that. The third-party claim against the owner and contractor is in addition to compensation, not instead of it, and comp is usually what pays for treatment in the meantime.
And you cannot lawfully be fired for it. New York prohibits an employer from discharging or discriminating against a worker for filing a claim, asking for a claim form, or testifying in a proceeding. (WCL § 120) If it happens, there are remedies — reinstatement, lost wages, and a penalty the employer pays personally, which no insurance policy is permitted to cover.
What is the "scaffold law"?
Labor Law § 240(1), and it is the strongest liability provision in New York personal injury law.
Where a worker is injured by a gravity-related risk — falling from a height, or being struck by something that falls — the statute requires owners and contractors to furnish scaffolding, ladders, hoists, slings, braces, ropes, and similar devices that give proper protection. If the required device was missing, defective, or inadequate for the task, and that caused the injury, liability attaches.
Three things follow, and they are unusual:
- You do not have to prove anyone was negligent in the ordinary sense. You do have to establish that the statute was violated and that the violation was a proximate cause of the injury.
- Your own carelessness is not a defense. The duty is non-delegable, and comparative negligence does not reduce a § 240 recovery. The narrow exception is where the worker's own conduct was the sole proximate cause — a genuinely high bar, and not what a supervisor means when he tells you it was your fault.
- It reaches beyond your employer. The owner and general contractor are liable whether or not they supervised anything.
No other state has a provision of this scope. It is also the reason defendants fight hard over whether § 240 applies at all — whether the task was covered work, whether the height differential was sufficient, whether a device was truly inadequate.
Do I have to be a "construction worker"?
No, and this catches people out.
The statute covers erection, demolition, repair, alteration, painting, cleaning, and pointing of a building or structure. That takes in electricians, plumbers, HVAC mechanics, painters, window washers, roofers, demolition crews, sign installers, and elevator mechanics, among others. Working for a subcontractor rather than the general contractor makes no difference.
One real carve-out exists: owners of one- and two-family homes who did not direct or control the work. How that exemption and the direct-or-control analysis apply differs by Labor Law section and by the facts, so it is worth asking about rather than assuming. On Long Island, where a great deal of the work is residential, whether the homeowner actually directed the job is often the first question worth asking.
Does my immigration status affect my claim?
No. The New York Court of Appeals settled this two decades ago, holding that federal immigration law does not preempt New York's Labor Law and that an undocumented worker's status does not bar recovery, including for lost earnings. (Balbuena v. IDR Realty LLC)
How you were paid does not change it either. Cash, 1099, or off the books — none of that affects a claim against the owner or general contractor.
One honest qualification: where a worker presented fraudulent work authorization documents to get hired, a lost-earnings claim can be limited. Medical damages and pain and suffering are not affected. It is worth raising with an attorney directly rather than assuming the worst.
Se habla español.
What if I wasn't hurt in a fall?
Two other provisions carry most of those cases.
Labor Law § 241(6) applies to areas where construction, excavation, or demolition work is being performed, but it requires identifying a specific, concrete provision of the New York Industrial Code that was violated — not a general safety principle. Debris in a walkway, inadequate lighting, unsecured openings, and defective equipment often fall here.
Labor Law § 200 is the common-law duty to provide a safe premises, put into statute. It requires showing the owner or contractor either supervised and controlled the work, or knew about a dangerous condition on the property and did nothing.
Comparative negligence does apply to both of these, unlike § 240. It reduces a recovery rather than barring it — New York's 2026 changes to the comparative fault rule apply to motor vehicle claims, not to construction cases.
Because these theories reach different defendants and carry different burdens, they are usually pleaded together. If one falls away on motion, the others remain.
How long do I have?
Three years from the date of injury for most claims. If the project involved a public entity — a school district, a municipality, a public authority — a notice of claim may be due within 90 days, though the exact procedure varies by entity and not every public authority follows the identical process, which is a very short window on a job site where the paperwork is often confused about who owned and who built.
Workers' compensation has its own separate deadlines. Filing one does not preserve the other.
What evidence disappears first?
Where a site accident is fatal, a separate wrongful death claim belongs to the family. Job sites change faster than almost any other accident scene. Within weeks the scaffold is dismantled, the ladder is back in a truck, the opening is covered, and the crew has moved to another job.
What matters early: photographs of the equipment and the location, the accident report, safety meeting and inspection records, the contracts establishing who owned the site and who controlled the work, and the names of the co-workers who saw it. Those witnesses are frequently the hardest thing to recover later, and often the most important.
Workers' compensation isn't your only claim.
Speak with Jordan Stern directly. The consultation is free, and there is no fee unless we recover.
Common questions
Under § 240 your own carelessness is not a defense at all. Under §§ 241(6) and 200 it reduces a recovery rather than ending it. What a supervisor says at the scene is not the law.
The claim against the property owner and general contractor does not depend on that. There is also a state fund that may pay benefits where an employer was uninsured, and an uninsured employer can sometimes be sued directly.
Ladders are named in the statute. What matters is whether the device provided proper protection for the task, not what it was called.
Then a notice of claim may be due within 90 days, well before most people have finished treatment. Those cases need attention immediately.
Speak with Jordan Stern
Injured on a job site anywhere on Long Island? The consultation is free and the conversation is confidential.
Stern & Stern · 49 West Merrick Road, Freeport, NY 11520
516-634-0345 · jstern@jordansternlaw.com · Se habla español
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