Opinion ID: 2634810
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: Landowner Liability in General and for an Independent Contractor's Employees

Text: [T]he basic policy of this state set forth by the Legislature in section 1714 of the Civil Code is that everyone is responsible for an injury caused to another by his want of ordinary care or skill in the management of his property. . . . The proper test to be applied to the liability of the possessor of land in accordance with section 1714 of the Civil Code is whether in the management of his property he has acted as a reasonable man in view of the probability of injury to others, and, although the plaintiff's status as a trespasser, licensee, or invitee may in the light of the facts giving rise to such status have some bearing on the question of liability, the status is not determinative. ( Rowland v. Christian (1968) 69 Cal.2d 108, 118-119, 70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561 ( Rowland ).) Applying these principles to the facts before it, in which a social guest injured his hand on a cracked water faucet, the court stated: Where the occupier of land is aware of a concealed condition involving in the absence of precautions an unreasonable risk of harm to those coming in contact with it and is aware that a person on the premises is about to come in contact with it, the trier of fact can reasonably conclude that a failure to warn or to repair the condition constitutes negligence. Whether or not a guest has a right to expect that his host will remedy dangerous conditions on his account, he should reasonably be entitled to rely upon a warning of the dangerous condition so that he, like the host, will be in a position to take special precautions when he comes in contact with it. ( Id. at p. 119, 70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561.) This formulation is similar to the Restatement of Torts Second, section 343, on which Kinsman in the present case partly relies. `A possessor of land is subject to liability for physical harm caused to his invitees by a condition on the land if, but only if, he [¶] (a) knows or by the exercise of reasonable care would discover the condition, and should realize that it involves an unreasonable risk of harm to such invitees, and [¶] (b) should expect that they will not discover or realize the danger, or will fail to protect themselves against it, and [¶] (c) fails to exercise reasonable care to protect them against the danger. Generally, if a danger is so obvious that a person could reasonably be expected to see it, the condition itself serves as a warning, and the landowner is under no further duty to remedy or warn of the condition. [Citation] However, this is not true in all cases. `[I]t is foreseeable that even an obvious danger may cause injury, if the practical necessity of encountering the danger, when weighed against the apparent risk involved, is such that under the circumstances, a person might choose to encounter the danger.' ( Krongos v. Pacific Gas & Electric Co. (1992) 7 Cal.App.4th 387, 393, 9 Cal.Rptr.2d 124 [duty to protect against obvious electrocution hazard posed by overhead electrical wires]; see also Rest.2d Torts, § 343A [possessor of land liable for obvious danger if the possessor should anticipate the harm despite such . . . obviousness].) 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. Nothing in the Privette line of cases suggests the contrary. As in Hooker and McKown, the hirer's liability in such circumstances would be derived from the hirer's rather than the contractor's negligence. In view of the above, the usual rules about landowner liability must be modified, after Privette, as they apply to a hirer's duty to the employees of independent contractors. As noted, the Restatement Second of Torts, section 343, states that the landowner's duty is triggered when it (a) knows or by the exercise of reasonable care would discover the condition, and should realize that it involves an unreasonable risk of harm to such invitees, and [¶] (b) should expect that they will not discover or realize the danger, or will fail to protect themselves against it.  (Italics added.) In light of the delegation doctrine reaffirmed by Privette, the italicized phrase does not seem applicable to landowner liability for injuries to employees of independent contractors. Because the landowner/hirer delegates the responsibility of employee safety to the contractor, the teaching of the Privette line of cases is that a hirer has no duty to act to protect the employee when the contractor fails in that task and therefore no liability; such liability would essentially be derivative and vicarious. (See Toland, supra, 18 Cal.4th at pp. 268-270, 74 Cal.Rptr.2d 878, 955 P.2d 504 [no duty to supervise work based on the hirer's superior knowledge of the proper safety precautions].) [2] But when the landowner knows or should know of a concealed hazard on its premises, then under ordinary premises liability principles, the landowner may be liable for a resultant injury to those employees. We therefore disagree with the Court of Appeal in the present case inasmuch as it holds that a landowner/hirer can be liable to a contractor's employee only when it has retained supervisory control and affirmatively contributes to the employee's injury in the exercise of that control. Rather, consistent with the above discussion, the hirer as landowner may be independently liable to the contractor's employee, even if it does not retain control over the work, if (1) it knows or reasonably should know of a concealed, pre-existing hazardous condition on its premises; (2) the contractor does not know and could not reasonably ascertain the condition; and (3) the landowner fails to warn the contractor. [3] The rule that landowners may be liable to contractors' employees for injuries resulting from latent hazardous conditions was followed in our pre- Privette cases. In Markley v. Beagle (1967) 66 Cal.2d 951, 59 Cal.Rptr. 809, 429 P.2d 129, for example, the employee of an independent contractor, en route to repair a ventilation fan on the hirer's roof, was injured when a mezzanine railing inside the building gave way. ( Id. at p. 955, 59 Cal.Rptr. 809, 429 P.2d 129.) As the court stated: Plaintiff was an employee of an independent contractor engaged by the tenant who operated the restaurant to service the ventilating system. He was therefore a business invitee of the owners to whom they owed a duty of reasonable care. They knew or should have known that he would use the mezzanine to get to the fan on the roof, and the jury could reasonably conclude that . . . the owners were negligent in failing to discover the dangerous condition of the railing and to either correct it or adequately warn plaintiff of it. ( Id. at pp. 955-956, 59 Cal.Rptr. 809, 429 P.2d 129.) Nothing in the Privette line of cases suggests that Markley is no longer good law. Abrons v. Richfield Oil Corp. (1961) 190 Cal.App.2d 640, 12 Cal.Rptr. 271, cited by Unocal, is not to the contrary. In Abrons, the employee of an independent contractor was injured when an oil-saturated ditch on the property of the hirer, the Richfield Oil Corporation, caved in. The Court of Appeal affirmed the nonsuit judgment against the employee, stating: `The Richfield employees exercised no supervision or control of the [contractor's] employees in the course of the latter's work. . . .' . . . The appellant observed that the ground that was being excavated was `oil saturated.' His testimony, as set forth in the settled statement, was that the `deeper he dug the more oil saturation manifested itself and there was an oily odor within the excavation.' Braun furnished no shoring materials. No one `from the Richfield Oil Corporation was present at any time and no one from Richfield observed the work or assisted in any way.' ( Id. at p. 646, 12 Cal.Rptr. 271.) Although the Abrons court focused on the hirer's lack of supervision and control, the fact that is most telling from the perspective of the present issue is that the hazard in question, the oil-saturated ground, although perhaps initially concealed, soon became apparent, and the contractor nonetheless failed to take appropriate safety precautions. [4] Another case cited by Unocal, Grahn v. Tosco Corp. (1997) 58 Cal.App.4th 1373, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 806 ( Grahn ), decided after Privette but before Toland and the other cases, resembles the present case factually and merits discussion. The employee of an independent contractor contracted asbestos-related lung disease from removing and installing insulation on defendant's jobsite in the 1970's. The plaintiff proceeded on three theories, negligent hiring, retained control, and premises liability. [5] As to the latter theory, the Court of Appeal held that the general negligence instruction given to the jury was prejudicially misleading. While a hirer has a duty to maintain its premises in a reasonably safe condition for employees of an independent contractor, not every dangerous condition on the hirer's premises subjects the hirer to liability for physical harm to the independent contractor's employees. Where the operative details of the work are not under the control of the hirer and the dangerous condition causing injury is either created by the independent contractor or is, at least in part, the object of the work of the independent contractor, the duty to protect the independent contractor's employees from hazards resides with the independent contractor and not the hirer who may also generally control the premises. ( Grahn, supra, 58 Cal.App.4th at p. 1398, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 806.) We find the above formulation somewhat confusing and only partly correct. It is not clear, in the context of premises liability, what it means to say that [w]here . . . the dangerous condition causing injury is either created by the independent contractor or is, at least in part, the object of the work of the independent contractor, the duty to protect the independent contractor's employees from hazards resides with the independent contractor and not the hirer who may also generally control the premises. ( Grahn, supra, 58 Cal.App.4th at p. 1398, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 806, italics added.) If the employee of an independent contractor as part of his job, for example, burrows into ground belonging to the landowner/hirer, and is injured when he ruptures an underground storage tank containing a hazardous substance that the landowner knew was present but the contractor did not, the dangerous condition causing the injury was arguably the object of the work of the independent contractor. ( Ibid. ) But that fact should not preclude landowner liability. What is critical in the above hypothetical is that if the landowner knew or should have known of the hazard and the contractor did not know and could not have reasonably discovered it, then the landowner delegated the responsibility for employee safety to the contractor without informing the contractor of critical information that would allow the contractor to fulfill its responsibility. Under such circumstances the landowner may be liable. Nor would it matter, as Unocal argues, that the substance was not hazardous until the employee performed a certain action that released the hazard. The landowner may be liable for any injury from a latent hazard that a contractor's employee would foreseeably encounter. (See Rowland, supra, 69 Cal.2d at p. 119, 70 Cal.Rptr. 97, 443 P.2d 561.) But Grahn's statement regarding the hirer's nonliability for hazards on the premises related to the object of the work of the independent contractor ( Grahn, supra, 58 Cal.App.4th at p. 1398, 68 Cal.Rptr.2d 806) does point to an important limitation on a landowner's duty toward the contractor's employees. A landowner's duty generally includes a duty to inspect for concealed hazards. (See Ortega v. Kmart Corp. (2001) 26 Cal.4th 1200, 1205, 114 Cal.Rptr.2d 470, 36 P.3d 11.) But the responsibility for job safety delegated to independent contractors may and generally does include explicitly or implicitly a limited duty to inspect the premises as well. Therefore, the principles enunciated in Privette suggest that the landowner would not be liable when the contractor has failed to engage in inspections of the premises implicitly or explicitly delegated to it. Thus, for example, an employee of a roofing contractor sent to repair a defective roof would generally not be able to sue the hirer if injured when he fell through the same roof due to a structural defect, inasmuch as inspection for such defects could reasonably be implied to be within the scope of the contractor's employment. On the other hand, if the same employee fell from a ladder because the wall on which the ladder was propped collapsed, assuming that this defect was not related to the roof under repair, the employee may be able to sustain a suit against the hirer. Put in other terms, the contractor was not being paid to inspect the premises generally, and therefore the duty of general inspection could not be said to have been delegated to it. Under those circumstances, the landowner's failure to reasonably inspect the premises, when a hidden hazard leads directly to the employee's injury, may well result in liability.