Dive summary:

• New York State may soon pull out some of the underpinnings for a century-old legal assumption in cases where a worker is injured while working on scaffolding or a ladder, and that could help contractors.
• New York law, since 1885, has been slanted to help injured workers, requiring contractors whom they are suing to prove that safety was properly addressed on the job site before the accident happened and that the worker contributed to his own accident.
• Legislation introduced by one Republican and one Democratic lawmaker would undo the current assumptions in the law.

From the article:

[The battle pits] some of the most powerful political interests in New York against each other, with hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance premiums and payouts — and, some argue, the safety of workers — hanging in the balance. ...