In 2007, cell phones were making their way into every pocket and purse. The iPhone had entered the market and telecom giants like AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile raced to build out the latest and greatest cell network — 3G — to meet the voracious demand.
But 2007 was also a year when 11 cell tower technicians in the U.S. fell to their death while building out this same network.
The year after, 12 more technicians would lose their lives climbing. And in 2013, as 3G transitioned into LTE, 13 climbers died on the job — with six of those deaths occurring across just 12 weeks.
While the telecom industry may reflect on these years as one of major growth for cell network demands — and the broader world may remember it for the boom of smartphones and social media — the tower climbing workforce that made that network possible may look back on them more mournfully.
Tower climbing is inherently more dangerous job than your average nine-to-five. But in 2012, research from ProPublica and PBS Frontline found that cell tower technicians were 10 times more likely to die on the job than other construction workers. It was even reported as the most dangerous job in the country at the time by the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics.
What was causing this disproportionate danger compared to other construction roles?
As essential as cell towers were to the success of their cell service at the time, major carriers asserted that construction and maintenance of these towers was not part of their core business. So, subcontracting has been the industry’s economically sensible approach to managing the ad-hoc work of the sector.
But subcontracting also detached the carriers — sometimes by as many as three or four layers — from the critical workforce building its networks, both professionally and legally.
“What you wind up getting is bottom feeder companies,” industry veteran Brendon King said in the documentary, The Life of a Tower Climber. “These smaller companies go out and do these jobs for way under what they actually should cost, and everyone gets put in dangerous positions at that point.”
Subcontracting safety: cascading consequences of multi-tier outsourcing
Outsourcing has long been an elected business strategy (even beyond broadband) both for construction know-how and squeezing out profit. But the process quickly favors the contractors most willing to drive down price — which doesn’t blend well with inherently dangerous work.
As the contracting layers propagate three, even four times, the ultimate party taking the hit is the climbers — both in wages and investment in training and equipment.
Recently appointed Director of Safety and Education at NATE Brian Bicknese told us in an interview that during his experience as a climber and crew manager in the 3G-buildout era, “There were definitely companies taking short cuts, and some of those shortcuts led to injuries and fatalities.”
Every new ‘G’ presented a race to meet new network demands, cell tower subcontractors were put under pressure, and subsequently, cell tower technicians were either hurt or killed.
As these escalating death rates gained attention, further spotlit by a record number of fatal falls in 2013, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) began looking more closely into the issue.
Investigations found many fatalities resulted from a lack of adequate fall protection.
“These are just a few of the tragedies that have occurred this year,” said David Michaels, former Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA, in 2014 regarding several cell tower fatalities. “But every single one of them could have been prevented.”
Many violations were deemed “willful,” which is defined by OSHA as a violation “committed with intentional, knowing or voluntary disregard for the law's requirements, or with plain indifference to worker safety and health."
One such violation was toward Wireless Horizon when a tower collapsed in Kansas that killed two workers, age 25 and 38, in 2014. One of the employees had only been with the company for two months, the other just five. OSHA’s site investigation found that the equipment provided by the company “was in poor repair.”
OSHA has found 73 violations in tower incidents since 2003. While they have been able to go after the subcontracting companies, that is not the case for carriers at the top of the chain — which are legally insulated from citations and fines.
“Legally there’s no way we can really get to that company,” OSHA’s Jordan Barab said in a documentary produced by FRONTLINE and ProPublica.
Between the years of 2003 and 2012, AT&T had more fatalities than its three major competitors combined, according to research from ProPublica. Yet “cell phone carriers’ connection to tower climbing deaths has remained invisible,” ProPublica Researcher Liz Day wrote.
Day explained that at that time (2012), looking in OSHA’s database of workplace accident investigations, no major cell carriers had a single listed climber fatality.
Furthermore, ProPublica investigations found that AT&T made no contractual efforts to enforce safety next to other areas of responsibility for contractors:
“AT&T contracts spell out precisely what level of responsibility it wishes to have over each aspect of tower projects. In a table called the Division of Responsibilities Matrix, the carrier lists more than 100 tasks and, for each one, indicates if AT&T wants responsibility for it, to be consulted on it, or to be informed about it.
In three-year contracts issued in 2008 that were examined by ProPublica and PBS 'Frontline,' the matrices were blank for safety-related items, such as ensuring that OSHA standards were met. Contractors told us they understood this to mean the carrier wanted no involvement with them at all. AT&T declined to answer questions about the matrix.”
A former risk manager at AT&T Steve Watts told the firm there was no question “that the pressure to build out the network has been a contributing factor to fatalities.”
Perhaps John Parham from Jacobs Engineering Group put it most succinctly: “You can’t subcontract safety.”
One climber, Ray Hull, was fortunate enough to survive an accident, but the circumstance sharply illustrated the pressure technicians like him have faced:
Hull was hired by a subcontractor in 2003 to build a 350-foot cell tower for Nextel in a Nebraska cornfield. He had one week to complete it, with a strict midnight deadline on Thanksgiving Day. When the crane operator decided it was too windy to work, he packed up and left.
Hull found equipment to replace it, but the equipment was in Texas — 20 hours away, he told Frontline in an interview. Hull and Frankie Ketchens, another tower tech, drove “nonstop” to get the gear loaded and drive back.
When they returned, Hull saw a Nextel truck parked near the base of the tower. Although it was a technician doing separate work, Hull believed it to be carrier oversight ensuring the project was on time. So instead of calling it a night, he went straight to work on the tower.
Hull scaled 240 feet to continue building the tower when Ketchens mistakenly pulled the wrong equipment lever holding a massive piece of steel. The equipment broke free and fell to the ground, with Hull attached to it. His safety harness briefly broke his fall, then snapped. Hull plummeted to the ground.
He suffered extreme internal injuries, leaving him unable to climb towers. “It was a bad day... or a good day, depending on which way you look at it,” said Hull in the documentary. “I walked away from it.”
While according to ProPublica, he received a settlement from the subcontractor that hired his firm, his case against the carrier Nextel was dismissed.
Nextel claimed it wasn’t responsible for Hull. As a subcontractor, he was “three entities removed from any relationship with a NEXTEL entity.”
And to this day “multi-employer policy remains in effect. The layers of subcontracting keep carriers well insulated from liability for safety issues on-site,” OSHA explained to Broadband Nation in an email-conducted interview.
Perils persist: recent tower climber deaths reflect the ongoing issue
Fatalities have declined since the 3G and LTE telecom booms, but they haven’t stopped. On September 25th, 2023, Darren Bishop died from a 250-foot fall off a guyed tower in Ohio.
OSHA was onsite within hours to open an investigation, but the entirety of the case took six months to complete — stalling Bishop’s employer, Overland Contracting, from paying out its insurance policy to his wife and kids.
Unreleased footage from The Life of a Tower Climber, shared with us by its creator Tommy Schuch (also an industry veteran) revealed the family’s process following the accident:
On the day of Bishop's fall, Overland contacted his wife via text message to inform her of Bishop’s death. She deleted it thinking it was a prank.
“Luckily,” said Bishop’s father-in-law, Steve Johnson, in response. “Because it was bad enough that we had to tell her, but I didn’t want her to find out that way.”
According to OSHA’s email correspondence with Broadband Nation, in the event of a fatal incident, a family liaison is notified, “at which time she verifies and confirms information regarding the fallen worker and sends a condolence letter out on behalf of herself and the Assistant Secretary of Labor for OSHA.” Family members can then contact the liaison or the office completing the investigation.
“It just seems like it's taking forever to get answers,” Johnson stated speaking on behalf of his daughter. At the time they had been waiting over five months. OSHA must issue citations within six months of the date of the fatality; Bishop’s case would take up the entire allotted window.
“I know they have to cross their T's, dot their I's and get everything just right, and they don’t wanna make any judgments or put out false statements... [but] the process could have been a little quicker with some feedback,” said Johnson.
While the investigation was gruelingly slow, the climbing community showed up to support the Bishops.
When a member of the family started a GoFundMe, it wasn’t gaining a lot of support until a climbing association shared the page. The fund shot up from around $2,000 to over $50,000 from fellow climber donations to support his wife and kids.
When OSHA concluded its investigation, it wrote in a letter to the contracting company that it found temporary anchorages using “girth hitch” knots (which can reportedly cause a sling to lose 50% of its strength). The knot was found in multiple fall protection components and fall positioning devices on the tower:
“This type of application limits/reduces the overall capacity of the anchor point and introduces employee work positioning complications possibly leading to the hitch pulling back on itself,” wrote OSHA.
Deeper in its investigation narrative sent to Overland, OSHA observed in an obtained video taken moments before Bishop’s fatal fall that he had multiple attachments tied to the same anchor point. “This is not a good fall protection practice,” the group stated.
They were not able to “fully substantiate a violation of OSHA standards” but advised that the company “voluntarily improve” its safety and health program “to address these type of work situations in the future," additionally requesting that Overland Contracting conduct a “refresher fall protection training classes with all employees.”
Safety practices remain a challenge
While these recent incidents do not necessarily stem from demands and timeline pressures, they still expose a lingering issue in enforcing good safety practices.
Schuch, who conducted the interview with Bishop’s family explained to Broadband Nation that Bishop’s case was another all-too-common instance of avoidable user-error that stemmed from a lack of standard safety practices within the industry.
He recalled an instance in his career as a tower foreman when he received a recruit from an unnamed tower training program. “This guy got up about 50 feet from the ground and just completely lost it, fell back into a safety climb and was just hanging there,” he said.
Schuch had to scale the tower to connect himself to the climber and lower him back down to the ground.
"He completely froze up. Yet, this guy is a certified climber at a school that I think he spent over a month training in. You have people out there giving certifications out like this, and then this guy will end up out on the site and end up dead.”
As evidenced by Darren Bishop’s tragic death, such incidents aren’t limited to newly trained climbers.
The first reported fatality of 2024 occurred earlier this summer when a 52-year-old contractor named Jose Ramiro Covarrubias fell 200 feet in North Carolina. Details surrounding the circumstances remain under OSHA investigation and unconfirmed.
Climbing alone: the cell tower sector’s lack of representation
For cell tower technicians like Ray Hull, timeline pressure was experienced on the job “all the time.”
In stark contrast, a director at the Communications Workers of America (CWA), Yonah Camacho Diamond, told Broadband Nation that in his career as a wireline technician repairman, he was never vulnerable to this type of pressure.
Diamond described that in the field he often saw other contracted technicians doing similar work to him. “What always struck me, especially with a lot of these tower climbers, is in my 20-year career, I never once climbed something that I thought was unsafe. And I never worried about that.”
Diamond has been in the industry since 1999 working on construction teams, laying fiber and more. He has been a CWA member since day one.
“I never even considered, what's my boss gonna say? How hot is this job? What's the repercussions of me not doing something that I consider unsafe? And that's 100% because I had a union card in my back pocket,” he explained.
While plenty of broadband technician positions are unionized, the cell tower sector has struggled to gain a collective representation — through a union or otherwise.
One such attempt has been The Tower Climbers United (TCU) formed by the CWA. The TCU first saw promise of a unionized crew in 2022, with a Qualtek contract materializing. The union officially got its first local on July 4th, 2023, in Las Vegas, NV.
Schuch was one of the veteran climbers working with TCU at the time. In his interview with us he reflected, “It was a happy, exciting day, because the tower climbers felt that we finally were going to be represented and that we had a voice that actually mattered."
But the contract negotiations with Qualtek continued to stall, and Diamond explained that “Qualtek shut down the facility soon thereafter, and we think that that was related to them unionizing.” Qualtek also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy the same year.
The union was able to negotiate an unfair labor practices lawsuit with a settlement of $40,000 paid out by Qualtek to eight former union tower technicians as severance. But the Wireless Estimator reasoned that the settlement could have been reached to avoid legal fees far exceeding the workers’ payout.
Since then, the TCU has struggled to gain any new union shops.
“We’ve tried all kinds of things,” Diamond explained. “We’ve tried the shop-by-shop basis, from the ground up. We have put pressure on the carriers and the tower owners... tried to engage from the top down.”
Using the latter attempt, the CWA brought several workers to shareholder meetings, such as Verizon and Crown Castle.
One climber who sat in with Verizon’s shareholder meeting last year was Schuch, where he asked the CEO if the carrier would meet with the union to discuss concerns.
At the time, Schuch expressed surprise and excitement to Fierce Network when the CEO agreed. Verizon at the time provided us with the following statement: "Workplace safety is a top concern for Verizon. We will follow up to ensure that the appropriate people meet to address the safety concerns expressed."
While the CWA has organized a segment of Verizon’s wireline broadband workforce, the carrier has often actively resisted efforts like these across the company.
In 2023, Verizon thwarted efforts from retail workers in Washington to unionize and funneled funds into “Americans for Tax Reform,” a conservative group led by Grover Norquist which has made efforts to block legislation bolstering workers’ rights to unionize.
Schuch’s involvement with the TCU has also since dwindled. “I supported [the TCU] in the beginning. I don’t support them anymore,” he said.
From his perspective, “there came a point where the CWA no longer had the trust or the backing of the majority of all the climbers. And I think once that happened, they lost all momentum, and all the work that we had put in kind of fell apart.” Schuch attributed his falling out with them to a lack of communication between the CWA and the workforce in developing a potential apprenticeship program.
He acknowledged that the CWA members “know more than the climbers do” and that their political power may be one means of unifying the sector — but he now believes in alternatives.
Primarily, Schuch advocates for a nationally recognized apprenticeship program and federal regulation on how tower jobs are contracted — at the very least holding contractors to “a higher standard” when it comes to safety and training.
From the CWA’s perspective, Diamond affirmed that their “rich and robust bargaining relationship with both AT&T and Verizon” is a strong point for their efforts. But he acknowledged that the cell tower industry is particularly disorganized.
This creates situations where through the entire process of sales, customer service and even technician work at the base of a tower, workers may be unionized. “But then you climb 200 feet in the air, and then you're not all of a sudden.”
Diamond sees this as an issue in many industries. "This is across the economy where corporations adopted this model of subcontracting for lots of reasons, but among them was because they wanted to avoid a unionized workforce that could be centralized, and they could have some leverage and have a collective voice," he said.
No such collective organization and standard currently exists for climbers.
“That's not okay. And [fatal falls] happen all the time,” said Schuch. But he hopefully acknowledged “it's getting better. I really believe things are getting better.”
One piece of legislation moving in this direction was enacted in New York by Senator Rachel May, aiming to provide protection for tower technicians in the state. It includes “requiring certain trainings during work hours without a loss of pay” and “certain reporting by bidders for telecommunication contracts.”
This effectively puts both training and contract-reporting requirements on carriers and subcontractors servicing any tower assets on land owned by the state of New York.
Section I of the bill (S09179) stated, “Tower climbing is an essential yet dangerous job – between 2003 and 2022, 166 workers in the cell tower industry died on the job - but there are few regulations and safety standards in place.”
According to Diamond, the issue was new to Senator May, and she was impassioned in trying to find solutions when speaking with the CWA. “She sees this as a first step... to shine a light on what goes on because so much of this is unknown to people... [and] to get a handle on more oversight of things.”
Training: a financial 'double whammy'
NATE’s Brian Bicknese told us that because contractors need to pay the employee for training, which are non-billable hours, it becomes “a double whammy to an employer” financially.
With the BEAD money-grab underway, there’s always apprehension on how the money ends up getting dispersed and where in the business it will be applied, Bicknese added. He thinks if it can be “applied to the safety and training side of those non-billable hours, knowing that employers have that cushion available to them... that would be huge.”
Indeed, BEAD initial planning funds can be used for workforce training, including for those of “related staffing capacity or consulting or contract support." But whether that is enough to gain investment across the levels of subcontracting remains uncertain.
A CWA senior researcher, Ceilidh Gao, told Fierce Network, “Oftentimes these companies…are not incentivized to do safe work. They’re being paid by the project, they may be rushed. And when a state or locality discovers problems... this company is often long gone.”
Bicknese does see how a union could help this issue, but he doesn’t like the idea of needing big brother to keep companies on track. “I don't think it's just going to come from a union making that all better," he said, instead advocating that it will take the whole industry really asking, "How can we all do better?”
One of NATE’s and OSHA collaborative attempts came through the ANSI/ASSP 10.48-2016 Construction Use Standard, first introduced in 2016. It sets minimum criterion for safety practices and training personnel working on towers and communication structures.
The standard also underwent recent revision last year which, according to Bicknese, largely looked to change “should” language to “shall” in further efforts to hold it as a proper standard.
He described the standard to be partially adopted by “the people writing the checks.” But it will boil down to contracts having this type of language to start moving the needle from his perspective.
“We've revised a lot of things and really made it into a true industry standard with minimum criteria for safety practices,” he added. “It’s really [about] engaging everybody and coming together to develop these standards, to develop all of these best practices.”
What keeps tower techs climbing?
One extremely common sentiment found in speaking with climbers across the industry: nobody knows we exist.
Just as major cell service carriers refuse to consider them a “core” part of the business, most people don’t realize what it takes for their phones to connect across a country, or moreover, how the sector that supports it operates.
“When you tell people you’re a tower climber, they don’t really understand what you mean by that,” said 11-year tower tech veteran Will Stone. “They just know they’re getting this cool device that’s giving them break-neck speeds, and they can watch videos... but I don’t see that people recognize this job of any importance.”
So, with all the pressures, the risks, the chaos and being generally overlooked for their contribution — why do climbers keep doing the work?
Of course, on some basic level, it can be about making money and paying bills. “This industry is very lucrative,” Ryan Dupal said in an interview with us. “If you just stay focused and keep moving forward, you will move up the food chain very quickly.”
But for some workers, pay isn’t enough — especially because it isn’t always consistent. One former climber, Eric Popielarski, explained to us that “When it’s good, it’s good. Nobody argues.” But slower periods mean the pay suffers.
“Companies should be grateful to have qualified, skilled people that show up and do this type of work, this dangerous work,” Popielarski added. During the particularly dangerous buildouts to make 3G and LTE growth possible, climbers were often only being paid $10 or $11 an hour.
Against all challenges, many climbers do it because they love it, they take pride in it, and they enjoy the extreme, unique way of seeing the world that only a job 500 feet in the sky provides.
“There’s nothing like being in the air,” Dupal said, describing it as something "you've never experienced before, but it's one that you'll never forget. It's very rewarding."
Schuch, through all his advocacy for improved safety and training standardization, said that from a monetary point of view, the work wasn't always worth it.
“A lot of us accepted bad wages because we knew we were a part of something awesome,” he said. “We do it because it's prideful, and we feel like we're making a difference in the world, because we really are.”
Stone similarly said, “Does the benefit outweigh the risk? A lot of climbers will say, yeah... It’s an adventure for them. They love the job. There’s a passion there."
But an industry that invests as deeply in them as a workforce is still a vision they are fighting for.
“We need to build a workforce of elite workers that look at tower climbing as an honorable profession and something to be proud of,” more akin to trade professionals like ironworkers, Schuch concluded. “And in return, they are paid well and they're well taken care of.”
Interested in learning more about the cell tower industry? Visit our Learning Center.
Register for our upcoming Broadband Nation Expo here and use code TOMMY200 for a special discount on your conference pass.