Cohousing-L Mailing List: Liability as an employer

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

This is for groups which sometimes hire a person to do something for the 
group. It's about Labor and Industry and other insurance coverage, or 
lack of it. 


Nobody wants to live in fear of worst-case scenarios, litigations, and 
such. You want to have that swing set even if a neighbor kid COULD get 
hurt on it. You want to have a public path through the place even if 
someone COULD trip and fall. You buy some insurance. You incorporate. But 
then you need a job done, and just pay someone to do it. Problems seem 
unlikely, but they can happen. 

In building our common house, we mostly used professional contractors. 
Also our own volunteer labor, for which we paid into Labor and Industry 
(L&I) coverage, despite all the paperwork and extra cost. And in a few 
cases, we simply hired our own members or non-members to do some "extra" 
work at an hourly wage. 

In one such case, the carpenter had previously worked for us as a 
contractor through a local building coop. But now there were some odd 
jobs left over, and he decided he'd rather work for those hours "on his 
own", saving the overhead of the co-op.  Seemed common-sense ok.

A mis-step on a ladder, a smashed hip, and he incurred five-digit medical 
expenses. Surely someone in such a risky occupation carried medical 
insurance? Nope. Family to support, lost work time, on top of surgery and 
rehab. Bummer. We brought him flowers and soup and sympathy.

Well, turns out he felt the need to apply for L&I compensation, even 
though he hadn't been covered under L&I by us or his co-op at the time of 
the accident. The upshot is that we are pouring time, money and energy 
into understanding our legal options, trying to remain calm in the face 
of potential financial impacts that could range from inconvenient to 
really major. Just the necessary legal advice is costing us thousands.  
And we are trying to remain compassionate about the needs of our friend 
who was injured. 

We carry a substantial liability policy, but it may or may not include 
people who are working for us, vs visitors, guests, or passers-by. 

Prefacing this with the awareness that L&I is a state-by-state affair, I 
nonetheless want to ask how other groups have dealt with the issue of 
employing people, whether as baby sitters, field mowers, snow shovellers, 
or casual laborers on construction projects. Have you looked into what 
your liability might be if such a worker were to be injured, or worse, 
while working for you? Do you really know whether your insurance covers 
you? Do you know if you have any personal vulnerability to lawsuits 
against the group, either as members or officers?

If anyone has relevant information to share with the list, it could be 
useful to others. We'll be doing a thorough examination of the issues, 
but part of that is checking with other groups. 

And if you haven't given serious thought to your liabilities as 
employers, I suggest you do so BEFORE you have to learn the hard way!

Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA