Hard Hats & Justice

In this episode of Hard Hats & Justice, Chris Gorayeb takes on the financial pressure that quietly determines case outcomes long before any legal argument does. He opens with the reality every injured construction worker faces: a strong scaffold law case that will take four or five years to resolve, medical bills piling up, rent due, kids needing school and food, and a workers' compensation check capped as of July 2025 at $1,222 per week, which for a worker previously earning $2,500 per week is less than half of prior income. He explains that insurance companies know exactly what an injured worker's bank account looks like and structure their strategy around that financial desperation, making low early offers designed to close cases at a fraction of true value. The math works for the carriers because they do it thousands of times a year. It does not work for the worker, who ends up with a closed case, no workers comp, an evaporated settlement, and often worse economic circumstances than before the accident. Litigation funding, sometimes called lawsuit lending or pre settlement funding, emerged to relieve that pressure. According to market research cited in industry reports, the global litigation funding market was valued at approximately $20.64 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach more than $51 billion by 2036.

Chris then walks through the December 19, 2025 Consumer Litigation Funding Act signed by Governor Hochul, New York's first regulation of the industry. According to Insurance Journal reporting on the legislation, the law caps funding company recovery at 25 percent of the gross recovery from the litigation, requires plain language contracts with specific disclosures of amount received, payment schedule, and maximum total repayment, grants a 10 day right of rescission, prohibits funders from influencing settlement decisions or referring clients to specific attorneys or medical providers, and requires all funding companies to register with New York State and file annual reports. He quotes sponsoring State Senator Jeremy Cooney's characterization of the pre law environment as opaque and often predatory, with vulnerable plaintiffs left in the dark about the true cost of funding. Chris then gives the practical breakdown clients need: the 25 percent cap applies to gross, not net, and the client remains the last person paid after the attorney fee, workers compensation lien, and litigation funding claim are settled. He closes with two warnings. First, never sign a funding agreement without your attorney reviewing it in detail. Second, some law firms need money as badly as their clients and will push early settlements to cover their own bills, which is why choosing an attorney with the financial stability to hold out for full case value matters as much as legal skill.

About Gorayeb & Associates, P.C.

Founded in 1981, Gorayeb & Associates, P.C. is one of New York's leading personal injury law firms, specializing in construction accident litigation. The firm has represented more than 12,000 injured workers and secured over $2 billion in verdicts and settlements. The firm provides bilingual legal services and free community education to immigrant and working class communities across the five boroughs.

For more information visit: https://www.gorayeb.com/en/

Keywords

litigation funding, Consumer Litigation Funding Act, pre settlement funding, New York lawsuit lending, insurance company delay tactics, workers compensation cap, 25 percent recovery cap, Governor Hochul December 2025, financial desperation settlement, Chris Gorayeb

In Episode 23 of Hard Hats & Justice, Chris Gorayeb tackles the widening gap between the hazards actually hurting workers in 2026 and the safety laws written to address the dangers of earlier eras. The Scaffold Law was written in 1885. Federal OSHA standards took effect in 1971. The silica dust standard did not take effect until 2017, more than a century after workers first started getting sick from silica. Meanwhile, lithium ion battery fires from cordless tools charging in unventilated site trailers, silicosis from engineered stone countertops, extreme heat in a warming city, and semi autonomous equipment workers have never been trained to operate are all moving faster than regulation. According to OSHA's 2025 fact sheet on lithium ion battery safety, construction sites face heightened risk because batteries are stored in bulk, integrated into equipment, and exposed to heat and mechanical damage, and a February 2026 US Department of Labor letter of interpretation clarified that lithium ion battery injuries must be recorded as work related on OSHA logs. Chris references the December 2025 Church Street Battery Storage Facility fire in Warwick, New York as an illustration of how large the response to a battery failure can become, and notes that new NYC Department of Buildings rules effective October 2025 govern large scale energy storage but not the everyday reality of workers charging 20 drills in an unventilated trailer at the end of a shift.

Chris then walks through engineered stone silicosis, where quartz countertops with silica concentrations of 90 to 97 percent are producing silicosis cases in workers in their 30s after only five to ten years of exposure. Australia banned engineered stone fabrication on July 1, 2024, becoming the first country to do so on the recommendation of Safe Work Australia, while the United States has not. On heat, he covers Mayor Zohran Mamdani's June 22, 2026 Executive Order Number 17, the first coordinated worker heat protection order in New York City history, which directs multilingual heat safety guidance, mandates heat illness prevention plans across every mayoral agency, and orders the Department of Buildings to strengthen construction site heat safety with recommendations due by March 1, 2027. He notes the order's finding that heat kills more than 500 New Yorkers annually and at least four construction workers died from heat related causes in New York State in 2024 alone, while the proposed federal OSHA permanent heat standard remains unfinalized. The critical takeaway is legal: Labor Law Section 200 and OSHA's general duty clause both cover recognized hazards regardless of whether a specific standard exists, meaning workers injured by emerging hazards still have viable claims if the hazard was recognized, the employer knew, and the employer failed to address it. Documentation, complaints, and written safety reports become the foundation for those cases.

About Gorayeb & Associates, P.C.

Founded in 1981, Gorayeb & Associates, P.C. is one of New York's leading personal injury law firms, specializing in construction accident litigation. The firm has represented more than 12,000 injured workers and secured over $2 billion in verdicts and settlements. The firm provides bilingual legal services and free community education to immigrant and working class communities across the five boroughs.

For more information visit: https://www.gorayeb.com/en/

Keywords

emerging construction hazards, lithium ion battery fires, engineered stone silicosis, heat safety executive order, Mamdani Executive Order 17, Labor Law Section 200, OSHA general duty clause, quartz countertop dust, Australia engineered stone ban, Chris Gorayeb

In this episode of Hard Hats & Justice, Chris Gorayeb opens with a comparison that captures the entire episode in a single frame: two nearly identical scaffold fall cases with the same labor law violations, same severity of injury, and same clear liability, one settling for over $1 million and the other for less than $100,000. The difference was not the law, it was a single witness. In the first case, a coworker saw the scaffold had no guardrail, testified clearly and consistently at deposition, and left the defense with nowhere to go. In the second, workers on the site had scattered by the time depositions were scheduled, two returning to their home countries and others moving to different states, leaving the injured worker's account uncorroborated and vulnerable to the insurance company's attack on his memory. Chris uses that $900,000 gap to explain why juries have to make credibility judgments when it is one worker's word against the general contractor's word, and why a single neutral witness who saw what happened can resolve disputed facts more powerfully than any legal argument.

The heart of the episode is a tactical walkthrough of what happens to witnesses across the life of a case. Chris explains how the defense will spend hours in deposition probing for inconsistencies between the accident report and the sworn testimony, will investigate the relationship between the witness and the injured worker to argue bias, and will dig into the witness's own employment history, immigration status, and prior legal matters to undercut credibility. He shares a client story from that same day, a worker who fell 16 feet off forms, whose boss refused to call an ambulance and tried to speak for him at the hospital, until the treating doctors recognized something was wrong and helped him tell the truth. Chris outlines what workers should do in the first 72 hours: get every witness name and phone number before leaving the job site, get a photograph of the accident report before signing anything, and call an attorney immediately so investigators can reach witnesses before defense counsel does. He closes with the discovery framework his firm uses, pulling employment records, safety logs, OSHA inspection history, prior incident reports, and Department of Buildings violation records, all of which become cross examination ammunition against the safety officers, foremen, and site superintendents who will testify that the site was safe.

About Gorayeb & Associates, P.C.

Founded in 1981, Gorayeb & Associates, P.C. is one of New York's leading personal injury law firms, specializing in construction accident litigation. The firm has represented more than 12,000 injured workers and secured over $2 billion in verdicts and settlements. The firm provides bilingual legal services and free community education to immigrant and working class communities across the five boroughs.

For more information visit: https://www.gorayeb.com/en/

In Episode 21 of Hard Hats & Justice, host Chris Gorayeb opens with the story of an undocumented worker who fell 15 feet from a scaffold with no guardrails, breaking his leg, cracking two ribs, and suffering a serious shoulder injury, only to be handed cash at the hospital by an employer who threatened to have immigration called if he filed a workers compensation claim. Every threat that employer made was illegal, and the cash he received was a fraction of what New York law owed him. Chris grounds the episode in research from the Center for Migration Studies of New York showing that immigrants make up roughly 63 percent of New York City's construction workforce and approximately 41 percent of those immigrant workers are undocumented, a rate five times higher than the undocumented share of the overall city workforce. He then lays out the plain language of the statute: New York Workers' Compensation Law covers all workers injured on the job in New York regardless of immigration status. According to the New York State Workers' Compensation Board and the NYC Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, undocumented workers may be eligible for weekly cash payments and free health care even if paid in cash, off the books, or misclassified as independent contractors.

Chris then walks through the controlling case law, the 2006 New York Court of Appeals decision in Balbuena v. IDR Realty LLC, which held that an undocumented worker injured on a job site due to labor law violations may recover compensation despite immigration status, and that the federal Immigration Reform and Control Act does not preempt New York State labor law unless the employer proves the worker submitted false documentation to obtain employment. Practically, this means the Scaffold Law, Labor Law Section 200, and third party claims for falling objects or defective equipment apply equally to undocumented workers. He addresses employer threats directly, citing New York City Human Rights Law and the New York State Attorney General's Office, which confirm that threatening, retaliating against, or reporting immigrant workers to authorities for exercising their legal rights is illegal and can trigger criminal and civil penalties. He acknowledges one honest complication: lost wages calculations in third party lawsuits become more complex for undocumented workers, but Balbuena directly addressed that issue too, holding that employers who failed to comply with immigration verification requirements cannot then weaponize immigration status as a defense. He closes with a direct message that the law protects everyone, and that fear of deportation should never be the reason a worker walks away from what they are owed.

About Gorayeb & Associates, P.C.

Founded in 1981, Gorayeb & Associates, P.C. is one of New York's leading personal injury law firms, specializing in construction accident litigation. The firm has represented more than 12,000 injured workers and secured over $2 billion in verdicts and settlements. The firm provides bilingual legal services and free community education to immigrant and working class communities across the five boroughs.

For more information visit: https://www.gorayeb.com/en/

Keywords

undocumented construction workers, immigration status rights, ew York Workers Compensation, Scaffold Law protection, employer retaliation, ICE threats illegal, third party lawsuit, Labor Law Section 200, Chris Gorayeb

New York City is in the middle of its biggest construction boom in a generation, with 18 supertall skyscrapers now defining the skyline, yet the safety system meant to protect the workers building them is actively deteriorating. In 2023, the average OSHA fine for a worker fatality dropped 45.6% to just $32,123, inspector positions at the NYC Department of Buildings sat 13.3% vacant, and 30 construction workers died in the city alone, the highest toll in a decade. Three out of four deaths occurred on non-union job sites, and Latino workers, representing only 10% of the state workforce, accounted for 26% of all construction fatalities, dying at more than twice their share. These numbers, drawn from the 2025 NYCOSH Deadly Skyline Report, point not to random tragedy but to a system that has structurally stopped protecting its most vulnerable workers.

Attorney Chris Gorayeb uses this data to make a precise legal and moral argument: when enforcement collapses, civil litigation under New York's Scaffold Law (Labor Law Section 240) becomes the last real line of accountability for injured workers and their families. The episode outlines six specific reforms needed, including dramatically higher fines, filled inspector positions, multilingual safety training, targeted oversight of non-union sites, barring repeat offenders from public contracts, and active prosecution under Carlos's Law, which raised the maximum corporate criminal fine to $500,000. For workers who cannot rely on regulators to protect them, Gorayeb and Associates, in practice since 1986, positions itself as the legal remedy the system itself no longer provides.

https://www.gorayeb.com/en/

About Gorayeb & Associates
Founded in 1986 by Christopher J. Gorayeb, Gorayeb & Associates, P.C. is a New York personal injury law firm serving injured workers across construction accident, workplace injury, and occupational disease litigation. The firm has recovered over $2 billion for more than 12,000 injured workers throughout New York and maintains offices in New York City. Gorayeb & Associates provides bilingual representation in English and Spanish and is known among the New York Latino workforce as The People's Lawyers.

For more information, visit www.gorayeb.com or call 212.267.2100.