What are the responsibilities of staffing services companies, and where does their involvement in temporary worker contracts end when it comes to health and safety?

The U.S. federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration or OSHA helps outline some of these issues, with online resources that address how partnering companies need to plan for common-sense worker protections. Those doing temporary jobs need the same support and resources as ‘full-timers’ and the full attention of the employer as well as the staffing agency.

First of all, OSHA points to what it calls a ‘joint responsibility’ for both the staffing service and a client business, in making sure that adequate training, hazard protection and record-keeping elements are in place. OSHA also recommends that an employer and a staffing agency include details of knowledge in these responsibilities in their contracts, so that these principles are acknowledged clearly and documented as the business relationships are set up.

The Nature of Temporary Work

In general, both government and business parties recognize that both the staffing service and the employer have a role — that staffing services introduce and orient their workers to the real environments and challenges that they will face in temporary jobs, and that the responsibility of the client company largely takes over when workers enter their doors.

In addressing this collaborative safety effort, OSHA provides a quote from David Michaels, Assistant Sec. of Labor for OSHA.

“Host employers need to treat temporary workers as they treat existing employees.” Michaels writes. “Temporary staffing agencies and host employers share control over the employee, and are therefore jointly responsible for temp employee’s safety and health. It is essential that both employers comply with all relevant OSHA requirements.”

Staffing Services and Job Oversight

The online OSHA resources dealing with temporary worker safety also bring up concerns about how some companies may try to use temporary staffing as a way to get around full OSHA compliance.

Staffing services have some amount of responsibility for ensuring that this is not the case. Often, staffing services send representatives to check up on how new temporary workers are doing. They do this for several reasons — one is that it makes some of these temporary workers feel better and more supported by the staffing service company. But it also provides more transparency between the two partnering companies on what workers are doing each day, and how they are protected from any industrial hazards.

This shouldn’t be seen as staffing services coming in to ‘check up’ on their clients or looking for things to report — in most cases, it’s just a natural part of promoting open and transparent contracts, and supporting temporary workers who have to be able to fit in and adapt to different job environments.

These types of guidelines from OSHA are important aspects of how temporary staffing gets done. They’re central to the responsibility of creating quality work places for some of the most vulnerable workers, doing some of the hardest jobs around. For more on worker safety and other staffing service issues, take a look at the Full Steam Staffing blog, where we keep talking about the challenges that our client businesses face, and how to promote collaborative success for everybody.