Suing Your Employer

Answer:

Here in Wyoming, it often comes up whether or not you can sue your employer if you’re covered by workers’ compensation. The answer to that is yes — if you’re actually employed by your employer you can sue. You can’t sue your employer if you’re covered by workers compensation. The question is what is an employer? Commonly, right now we can have third-party contract employees that work for some kind of a temp agency. The temp agency is actually the employer, and they contract. The temp agency contracts with the general contractor or contracts with the subcontractor, and therefore, you’re not an employee of the subcontractor under Wyoming law or the general contractor. Under Wyoming law, what counts is who pays into the workers’ compensation fund. If you pay into the workers’ compensation fund, then you’re not liable for the injury to the employee. It depends on what you consider to be employer. Just because they’re directing what occurs on the job doesn’t mean that they’re the employer.

I’ve had lots of construction site cases where we’ve been in the position where we’ve been able to sue the general contractor, the subcontractor, or both. We’ve actually been able to sue the owner of the premises, too, because they were not covered by workers’ compensation. An attorney needs to get to the bottom of that. I had a grocery store case, not a construction case, where a young man went through a window and severed his arm while on the job, and we were able to recover from the employer in that case because it was a workers’ compensation. They were not paying – that grocery store chain was not paying into the workers’ compensation fund. What matters is whether or not they’re actually paying into the fund, and that’s something we have to investigate in the case to find out the information. With that information, we can help, so feel free to call my office and ask me any other questions you may have regarding personal injury in a construction site here in Wyoming.