 | | INSIDE EDITION was troubled to find a number of workers at the site of a 14-story building regularly head to the bar for liquid lunches. | |
 | | INSIDE EDITION producers saw this worker drinking at a bar on six different days. On one day, he went right back to welding on a high floor. | |
 | | Coworkers attempt to wrestle the Vitamin Water bottle away from this construction worker, to no avail. | |
 | | INSIDE EDITION cameras spotted him drinking from a Vitamin Water bottle that we had earlier seen him filling with alcohol. | |
 | | When INSIDE EDITION's Matt Meagher confronted this construction worker, he denied that he was taking alcohol back to work. | |
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At the construction site of a 14-story tower being built on the West Side of Manhattan, iron workers painstakingly piece together the guts of what will be hundreds of new classrooms for the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. It's a dangerous job that requires construction workers to be on the top of their game.
That's why INSIDE EDITION was troubled to find a number of workers from the site regularly heading to a bar for a liquid lunch.
On a dozen different days, INSIDE EDITION's undercover producers saw workers down at least three drinks each in just 45 minutes. And although it's a lunch break, few of them ate anything. After downing a few cold ones, it's a short walk back to the site just a block away...And then it's back to work performing dangerous jobs hundreds of feet above a busy New York City avenue.
So why should INSIDE EDITION be so concerned about what these construction workers do on their lunch break? The building is going up right outside INSIDE EDITION's newsroom windows.
We saw one man drinking at the bar on six different days, and then going right back to work, sometimes welding on a high floor.
Another worker was also a regular; INSIDE EDITION saw him in the bar ten times. And after lunch one day, it was right back to work where we saw him perched precariously, walking on thin beams 14 stories up.
But what a third man was doing was extremely scary. On the ten days INSIDE EDITION producers observed him, he would typically order at least three drinks, and then he'd pour one into an empty Vitamin Water bottle, add a little ice, put it in his back pocket and then return to the site.
Each time, just a short while later, INSIDE EDITION cameras captured him drinking his "one for the road" as he worked.
And it appears INSIDE EDITION wasn't the only one concerned by this. After one liquid lunch, his coworkers tried to wrestle the bottle away from him, to no avail.
On another day, that same construction worker who likes to take "one for the road" in his Vitamin Water bottle orders five drinks in less than an hour. INSIDE EDITION's Chief Investigative Correspondent tried to talk to him on his way back to work.
"Are you putting yourself and others in danger by spending your entire lunch break drinking in that bar?" asked Matt Meagher.
"I wasn't in the bar, I was in a diner," says the construction worker.
He said he wasn't in the bar, and denied taking alcohol back to work.
"We've watched you up on the iron go back to work after you poured a drink into that Vitamin Water bottle and drink that 14 stories up on the iron," said Matt Meagher.
"Not me," he responded.
Turner Construction Company, which manages the site, says it has begun an investigation into INSIDE EDITION's findings and "any worker found intoxicated or consuming alcohol during the performance of their job will be removed from this job."
New Jersey attorney Kevin Begley specializes in construction accidents. He says workers drinking on the job is a recipe for disaster: "Someone is going to get injured. The worker or someone else."
And Begley says there should be laws that would prevent an already dangerous job from becoming potentially deadly.
"You don't let them drink and return to a project. It shouldn't be tolerated," he says.
INSIDE EDITION called the local ironworker's union, which said it doesn't condone this type of behavior at all.
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