United States: Employee Assigned by Personnel Agency May Not Sue “Borrowing” Firm in Negligence

Construing California law, a federal district court granted summary judgment to a defendant company that had been sued by a worker who sustained injuries when one of the company’s employees “bumped” his forklift blade into the plaintiff while the two men were working at the company’s facility. The defendant company contended the plaintiff, who had been assigned to work at the company’s facility, was its special employee and that the civil action asserting, inter alia,claims of negligence and negligent hiring were barred by the exclusive remedy provisions of Cal. Labor Law § 3600. The court agreed. While the plaintiff disputed the extent of control that the company’s supervisors exerted over him, he did not dispute the fact that he was significantly subject to their control. The relevant issue was whether the defendant company had the right to control the worker, not whether it exercised that right.

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 Jimenez v. Medline Indus., 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 139247 (E.D. Cal. Aug. 15, 2018)

See generally Larson’s Workers’ Compensation Law, § 68.01.

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