Illinois: Borrowing Employer’s Immunity From Suit Does Not Depend Upon Procurement of Insurance

A borrowing employer is immune from tort liability with regard to injuries sustained by a temporary staffing agency worker assigned to it, held an Illinois appellate court. Moreover, that immunity springs from the borrowed-employee relationship itself. It is not tied to the borrowing employer’s provision, directly or indirectly, of workers’ compensation insurance coverage. The court stressed that the borrowing employer statute, 820 ILCS 1(a)(4), explicitly contemplates that the loaning employer, rather than the borrowing employer, might be the entity that provides or pays the workers’ compensation premiums or benefits.

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

LexisNexis Online Subscribers: Citations below link to Lexis Advance.

See Holten v. Syncreon N. Am., Inc., 2019 IL App (2d) 180537, 2019 Ill. App. LEXIS 386 (May 31, 2019)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 67.01.

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

For a more detailed discussion of the case, see