Court Opinion

ID: 9639193
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-22 16:07:34.518013+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T18:10:13.957740
License: Public Domain

RODOWSKY, Judge,
concurring.
In Whitehead v. Safway Steel Products, Inc., 304 Md. 67, 497 A.2d 803 (1985), Judge Eldridge wrote an opinion dissenting from “the Court’s determination that, as a matter of law, ‘a person who is employed by a temporary services agency is also an employee of the company to which he is provisionally assigned.’ ” 304 Md. at 85, 497 A.2d at 812 (quoting from the Court’s statement of the issue, 304 Md. at 70, 497 A.2d at 805). I joined that dissent because, in large part, I read the Court’s Whitehead opinion as holding that provisional assignment of a worker from a temporary help agency to the agency’s customer was sufficient, in and of itself, to make the worker an employee of the agency’s customer as a matter of law. See Whitehead, 304 Md. at 79-80, 497 A.2d at 809-10 (majority opinion).
The remand of the instant case for factual determinations demonstrates that the agency’s customer is not always either the sole employer, or at a minimum a co-employer, of a worker obtained from a temporary help agency. Consequently, the question of law on which Whitehead was decided (whether correctly or incorrectly) arose from what the majority must have viewed as undisputed material facts which involved more than simply whether the worker there involved had been provisionally assigned by the temporary help agency to its customer.
*664I write separately to highlight the significance of today’s opinion in relation to Whitehead, lest others give the same mistakenly broad reading to Whitehead as did I.