Federal: Building Materials Supplier is Statutory Employer of Truck Driving Making Deliveries

Where a truck driver was employed by a trucking company that, in turn, contracted with a building materials supplier to provide delivery services related to materials purchased at the supplier’s stores, the building materials supplier was the driver’s statutory employer for purposes of the Kentucky Workers’ Compensation statute. Accordingly, he could not sue the supplier in tort following an injury on the supplier’s premises. The district court reasoned that first, the supplier hired the trucking company to pick up and deliver goods such as construction materials from multiple retail locations in Kentucky and Indiana. Second, the pick-up and delivery of construction materials and other goods for the supplier was a customary, usual, or normal part of its business that it repeated with some degree of regularity. Third, the picking up and delivery of goods purchased by the supplier’s customers amounted to work that it or similar businesses would normally perform or be expected to perform with employees.

Thomas A. Robinson, J.D., the Feature National Columnist for the LexisNexis Workers’ Compensation eNewsletter, is the co-author of Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law (LexisNexis).

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Mueller v. 84 Lumber Co., 2016 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 139078 (W.D.Ky., Oct. 6, 2016)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 111.04.

Source: Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, the nation’s leading authority on workers’ compensation law