This is the second of a two-part series first published on the ProPublica website and was co-published with PBS "Frontline."Read part one, In Race For Better Cell Service, Men Who Climb Towers Pay With Their Lives, and watch the PBS "Frontline" program.
When federal lawmakers passed landmark legislation creating the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, they intended to protect workers by imposing clear, uniform rules on their employers.
The 1970 law assumed that the relationship between companies and the people they hired for dangerous jobs would be straightforward, employer to employee.
No one planned for industries like tower climbing.
Tower climbers, the roughly 10,000 workers who build and maintain the nation's TV, radio and cell towers, aren't hired directly by the corporations that rely on their labor. They're subcontractors, sometimes separated by a daisy chain of other contractors from the companies that ultimately pay for tower projects.