Employee Leasing Company Must Notify Leased Employees of Contract Termination
An employee-leasing company must directly notify each leased employee - not just the client company - when it terminates its leasing contract with the client company. If it doesn't, the leasing company will still be regarded as the employer for purposes of the Florida Workers' Compensation Act when the non-notified employee is injured on the job. So says s.468.525(4)(f), Fla. Stat., and the First District Court of Appeal in Blue Stone Real Estate v. Ward, decided on 7/20/2007.
The leasing company here (Matrix Leasing) agreed to employ the claimant (Ward) and the owner (McMahon) of the two-man client company (E&L Concrete) and to "lease" the two back to the client company in July 2004. After a few months, both McMahon and Ward left Florida and went to New York to work, at which time McMahon requested Matrix to consider E&L's account "inactive" while he was away. Matrix Leasing apparently did so, but it never formally notified Ward that its contract with E&L had been terminated. McMahon and Ward returned to Florida in December 2004, and E&L then contracted with Blue Stone Real Estate to perform some construction work. It was while he was doing that work that the claimant was injured on 12/13/2004.
The JCC's decision can be found here. He had concluded that Blue Stone Real Estate - which carried no workers' compensation insurance - was the claimant's employer at the time of his accident. But the First District said that Matrix Leasing's failure specifically to notify the claimant that it had terminated its contract with E&L meant that Matrix still employed the claimant at the time of his accident.
