Mike Reicher, USA TODAY NETWORK – Tennessee
Published 10:00 p.m. CT May 5, 2018
After his brother died falling off the roof of a North Nashville home under construction, Hermenegildo Dominguez heard nothing from the roofing subcontractor. He heard nothing from the general contractor. Nothing from an insurance company.
Typically, workers’ compensation would have covered $10,000 of funeral expenses, but Alfonso Dominguez, 60, was essentially off the books. It would cost $15,000 to fly his body to his hometown of Vera Cruz, Mexico, and bury him.
Only after the Spanish-language news site Nashville Noticias posted about the June 2017 accident on Facebook did Hermenegildo Dominguez get a response. But it wasn’t from the construction companies. Other immigrants throughout Nashville sent him donations.
Today, Dominguez, who cleans construction sites in Nashville, is less concerned about compensation: “What I really want is to get justice,” he said.
Alfonso Dominguez’s death shows how some construction companies can evade liability for accidents, especially in a booming city like Nashville. A labor shortage has led to a fracturing of work sites, where subcontractors can’t complete projects with their normal crews, so they hire small “subs of subs” below them. Workers at the bottom are sent onto scaffolding and roofs without safety equipment or training, or the assurance their families will be taken care of if they fall.
More construction workers died in the Nashville metro area in 2016 and 2017 compared with any two-year stretch in the previous three decades. Most of the 16 deaths were from falls without any harnesses or other protection.