Over the years, the Court of Appeals’ decisions concerning the so-called scaffold statute, Labor Law §240, have often been fairly pro-worker. By contrast, the Court’s rulings concerning the sister statute, Labor Law §241(6), have sometimes seemed antithetical to the interests of work site safety and at odds with the plain language of the statute. It is therefore all the more noteworthy when the Court renders two pro-worker rulings in the same year concerning Labor Law §241(6). That occurred this year with the rulings in St. Louis v. Town of Elba1 in March and Wilinski v. 334 East 92nd Street Housing Development Fund Corp.2 just last week.
The Court ruled in St. Louis that a regulation that governed a particular kind of equipment could also apply to a different instrumentality if that instrumentality was being used as if it were the regulated equipment. In Wilinski, the Court was confronted with a regulation that had been construed two ways by the lower courts, and it deemed the broader construction the “better” of the two.
