5 Ways Skilled Temporary Staffing Lowers Cost Reduces Worker’s Comp Exposure
It’s a fact: Adding more permanent employees to your payroll increases your workers’ compensation costs and exposure. It’s logical based on the fact you’ll need to pay for additional premiums and you’ll have more employees on the jobsite who can get injured, which would adversely affect your premium rates.
By running a lean permanent workforce and supplementing your core employee base with contract craftworkers from Tradesmen International to meet the rising workload, you minimize workers’ compensation costs and exposure. This is because we cover our employees under our own insurance, which means you don’t have additional premiums to pay on. In addition, claims filed by our employees are the sole responsibility of Tradesmen International, meaning you will not experience premium rate increases for any non-employee injury, nor will these claims on these injuries impact your Experience Modification Rate (EMR) in any way.
Minimize Out-of-Pocket Expenses
When you partner with Tradesmen International, we take on all ownership and responsibility if one of our employees is injured on your project. This lets you save in four key ways:
- Insurance Premiums: While it varies from state to state, you are required to cover all workers’ compensation costs on all your permanent employees. We take on this cost for our employees.
- Medical Costs: Any medical costs incurred by our craftworkers, including hospital visits and medical procedures, are covered under Tradesmen International’s insurance.
- Lost-Time Costs: Again, we cover any temporary total disability benefits (TDD) if one of our employees is injured.
- Time Investment: In the event of an injury, we have procedures in place to ensure our injured employee seeks the proper care and is taken care of quickly and appropriately. Tradesmen International is also equipped to quickly dispatch a replacement skilled craftworkers, letting your field management maintain focus on managing the project while also having the right number of workers to keep your project on time and on budget.
Protect Your EMR
There’s no question that your core permanent employees are your most skilled and safety-minded workers. It is also commonly known that short-term employees – those workers put on payroll to meet workload spikes – are more prone to workplace injuries, which impact your EMR. Since Tradesmen International takes on all responsibility for our craftworkers’s workers’ compensation claims, your EMR won’t go up if one of our people is injured – effectively letting you add more workers to your project without risking your EMR or your “safety rating.”
And with the increasing weight placed on a contractor’s EMR, reducing workers’ compensation exposure has become more important than ever. Where the EMR was previously used mainly to calculate insurance premiums, today more and more state, federal and even private construction contracts include an EMR requirement as a pre-requisite to bid. That means a high EMR can eliminate you from even submitting a bid (in addition to raising your insurance costs).
States like California, Tennessee, Kentucky, Connecticut, Maine and Missouri have included EMR requirements as a pre-qualifier to bid on recent contracts. Plus, while the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) does not mention the EMR specifically, it does state that, “To be determined responsible, a prospective contractor must… Have the necessary organization, experience, accounting and operational controls and technical skills… including as appropriate… quality assurance measures and safety programs applicable to materials to be produced or services to be performed by the prospective contractor and subcontractors” (FAR 9.104-1, General Standards). While there’s no way around assuming the risk on your permanent employees, Tradesmen International can relieve this burden for your short-term workers.