Two people died on Nashville construction sites last year.
Worker safety organizers say that Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, data is undercounted.
For over year, Nashville construction workers, their advocates and city officials got together to make construction sites safer. They came up with the Get It Right law.
A local law attempted to hold the head contractor accountable for safety violations by icing them out of getting a city contract for a few years. But as the bill was being drafted, the state undermined that effort.
Despite that, the council was adamant and passed it into law.
“My attempt is not to go and pick a fight with the state,” councilmember and bill writer Sandra Sepulveda said at the meeting last year. “But I’m not going to back down from a fight with the state.”
But in this case, the mayor decided to back down from the fight. Each year, the mayor decides what priorities to lobby for at the state. His office makes the decision based on feedback from city department heads, Tennessee Municipal League, County Services Association and the Nashville Chamber of Commerce.
From there, the government relations team analyzes the impact the legislation and amendments could have on the city. “As a result, the city has been able to stave off some unhelpful legislation this year and been able to support legislation that offers the city opportunities for improvement,” a spokesperson from the mayor’s office tells WPLN News via email.
The mayor’s office says instead they’ll be fighting for education, transportation and safer streets.
“Our office repeatedly met with the sponsor of the bill and its proponents from labor and agreed that pursuing this legislation would almost certainly be counter-productive since the state legislature was already preparing legislation directly aimed at nullifying our efforts and setting back labor protections even further,” the mayor’s office said. “We strongly support protections for workers and Mayor Cooper’s administration will continue to work closely with our partners in the labor movement to ensure that they are adequately protected and supported on the job, including his commitment to establish a living wage for Metro workers.”
But Prado says it was a discouraging blow to immigrant workers trying to advocate for change through the local government.
“Either they are in agreement with the state of Tennessee (or) they don’t care about workers,” Worker’s Dignity Director Cecilia Prado says. The organizers of the group and construction workers that seek their help all had a hand in crafting the law.
The only thing left after the state’s preemption is changing who is on the city’s procurement board.
Update: This story has been updated to include additional comment from Mayor John Cooper’s office on its lobbying efforts.
On Air - 90.3 WPLN-FM