Kinsman v. Unocal Asbestos case: Landowner Liability Principles

Read the discussion in the Kinsman v. Unocal asbestos case, where the principles of landowner liability are discussed.

The question before us is how these general principles apply when a landowner hires an independent contractor whose employee is injured by a hazardous condition on the premises. As we have discussed, the hirer generally delegates to the contractor responsibility for supervising the job, including responsibility for looking after employee safety.

When the hirer is also a landowner, part of that delegation includes taking proper precautions to protect against obvious hazards in the workplace. There may be situations, as alluded to immediately above, in which an obvious hazard, for which no warning is necessary, nonetheless gives rise to a duty on a landowner’s part to remedy the hazard because knowledge of the hazard is inadequate to prevent injury.

But that is not this case, since Kinsman acknowledges that reasonable safety precautions against the hazard of asbestos were readily available, such as wearing an inexpensive respirator.

Thus, when there is a known safety hazard on a hirer’s premises that can be addressed through reasonable safety precautions on the part of the independent contractor, a corollary of Privette and its progeny is that the hirer generally delegates the responsibility to take such precautions to the contractor, and is not liable to the contractor’s employee if the contractor fails to do so.

We see no persuasive reason why this principle should not apply when the safety hazard is caused by a preexisting condition on the property, rather than by the method by which the work is conducted.

However, if the hazard is concealed from the contractor, but known to the landowner, the rule must be different. A landowner cannot effectively delegate to the contractor responsibility for the safety of its employees if it fails to disclose critical information needed to fulfill that responsibility, and therefore the landowner would be liable to the contractor’s employee if the employee’s injury is attributable to an undisclosed hazard.

Courtesy of http://www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions/archive/S118561.PDF

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