The Staffing Agency Is Not the Only Employer of Your Temporary Workers
OSHA treats host employers and staffing agencies as jointly responsible for temporary workers. Across many sites with different agencies, the division of duties is rarely written down anywhere.
Ask a plant manager who is responsible for the safety of the temporary workers on their floor and the answer is often "the agency — they're not our employees."
OSHA's position is that both the staffing agency and the host employer have responsibilities toward those workers, and that the division between them depends on who controls what.
Joint responsibility, divided by control
The agency and the host are generally treated as sharing responsibility for temporary workers' safety and health. The allocation follows control:
The host employer controls the worksite, the equipment, the processes and the day-to-day supervision. Site-specific hazard training, site-specific controls, and the conditions the worker is actually exposed to sit with the host.
The staffing agency places the worker and retains a continuing obligation. General safety awareness training and inquiring into the conditions workers are placed into sit with the agency. An agency that places workers and asks nothing further is not meeting its part.
Neither party discharges its duty by pointing at the other. The contract between them can allocate commercial risk; it does not reassign the duty owed to the worker.
Where multi-site operators come unstuck
Different agencies at different sites. Ten facilities can easily use six agencies on six different contracts negotiated at different times. What each agency covers before placement varies, and probably nobody has compared them.
Nobody knows the head count. Ask how many temporary workers were on site across the estate last week. At many multi-site employers this takes days, because temps are engaged locally and often do not appear in the HR system. If you cannot count them, you cannot say what they were trained on.
Site induction is treated as optional for temps. Because the agency "handles training," the host's site-specific induction sometimes gets abbreviated for temporary workers — exactly inverting where the responsibility sits. Site-specific hazards are the host's to communicate.
The injury lands in the wrong record. Recordability for a temporary worker generally turns on supervision: an employer records injuries for workers it supervises on a day-to-day basis, even where another entity handles pay. Hosts who assume every temp injury belongs on the agency's log may be under-recording their own.
The placement is not matched to the hazard. A worker placed for general labour ends up assisting with a task involving energy isolation or work at height. The agency was never told; the host never flagged it.
What to fix, and roughly in what order
Count them. Establish how many temporary workers are on each site and what they are doing. Everything else depends on this and it is usually the missing piece.
Give temps the same site induction as anyone else. The host controls the site and knows its hazards. Abbreviating induction for temporary workers gets the allocation exactly backwards.
Write down the division, per agency. For each agreement, state plainly what the agency covers before placement and what the host covers on arrival. Where six contracts differ, that document is the only way anyone knows which rules apply where.
Tell the agency what the work actually involves. Agencies can only train to what they are told. A placement described as "warehouse general" that turns out to involve powered equipment is a failure of description, and it is the host's description.
Decide recordability deliberately. Establish who supervises temporary workers day to day and apply that consistently. Sites making the call independently will not reach the same answer, and your injury numbers will reflect the inconsistency rather than the safety performance.
Include temps in your inspections. A walkthrough that only observes badged employees misses a population that is typically newer to the site and less familiar with its hazards.
Why it deserves attention now
Temporary workers are, as a group, newer to the workplace than the people around them. New workers are less familiar with the layout, the equipment and the local shortcuts, and less likely to raise a concern in their first weeks.
That is the case at one site. Across an estate using multiple agencies with differing arrangements, the variation compounds — and the population most exposed to it is the one least equipped to push back.
The question to ask
Pick your largest site. Ask who provided the site-specific hazard training to the temporary workers currently on the floor, and where that is recorded.
If the answer is that the agency handles it, the responsibility has been allocated to the party that does not control the hazard — and that is worth correcting before anything forces the question.
General guidance only, not legal advice. Responsibilities for temporary workers are fact-specific and depend on the arrangement between host and agency. Consult qualified counsel and a safety professional regarding your staffing arrangements.
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