The rise in the use of contract and temporary workers raises questions about who is responsible for their safety in the workplace.
But employers who use these workers at their work sites would be unwise to assume that they can offload their responsibility to protect them from injury and illness simply because they are not directly employed by their companies, experts say.
“I think that it’s attractive for a lot of companies to have outsourced labor, mainly because it creates a lot of savings for the company,” said Brian A. Richardson, Richmond, Virginia-based director of the litigation practice group at McCandlish Holton