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Martin Banks is a partner of Stoel Rives' Environmental Law practice group and Litigation practice group. His environmental practice includes counseling clients in cost-effective regulatory compliance and permitting strategies. He has broad experience with issues involving the Clean Air Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Administrative Procedures Act and the clean-up and transfer of contaminated properties. Martin's business litigation practice includes environmental and natural resource matters, real estate and land use issues (including public land use), construction disputes and OSHA matters.

In an unapologetic rejection of a decades-old legal fiction hatched by the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration ("OSHA") and embraced by Utah Division of Occupational Safety and Health ("UOSH"), on January 31, 2014, the Utah Supreme Court repudiated the multi-employer worksite doctrine. Hughes General Contractors v. Utah Labor Commission, 2014 UT 3. The Court based its repudiation on the doctrine’s “incompatibility with the governing Utah statute.”

The so-called multi-employer worksite doctrine makes a general contractor responsible for the occupational safety of all workers on a worksite, including those who are not even the general contractor’s actual employees. In rejecting that doctrine, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the responsibility for ensuring occupational safety in Utah is limited to an employer’s actual employees.

Hughes was a general contractor overseeing a construction project involving multiple subcontractors, including a masonry subcontractor. UOSH invoked the multi-employer worksite doctrine and cited Hughes for improper erection of scaffolding in connection with the masonry subcontractor’s work, concluding that Hughes was responsible as a “controlling employer” under Section 34A-6-201 of the Utah Occupational Safety and Health Act (UOSH Act) given Hughes’ “general supervisory authority over the worksite.” Hughes challenged the legal viability of the doctrine before the Administrative Law Judge, who upheld the citation; and then the Labor Commission’s Appeals Board affirmed the ALJ’s decision. The Board based its decision on the notion that Section 34A-6-201 “mirrors its federal counterpart, which was interpreted [by the 10th Circuit] to endorse” the doctrine. Id., ¶5.Continue Reading Utah Supreme Court “Repudiates” the Federal Multi-Employer Worksite Doctrine