Paying your staffing firm's workers' comp premiums won't shield you from a negligence lawsuit, Maine's top court ruled.
In a decision handed down on May 19, 2026, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed that Envirovantage, Inc., a New Hampshire corporation, can be sued for negligence by a worker the staffing firm Enviro Staffing assigned to its Portland job site – even though Envirovantage was paying for that worker's comp coverage through its invoices.
The ruling is a wake-up call for host employers that assume staffing arrangements come with built-in immunity. They don't, unless the paperwork is set up the right way.
Here's what happened. In May 2020, Enviro Staffing, a Florida-incorporated firm authorized to do business in Massachusetts, hired Roberto Valmont-Olivier, a Massachusetts resident. The firm assigned him to work for Envirovantage in Portland, Maine. He stayed at a Maine hotel during the job. On June 8, 2020, he was injured on the site. An Envirovantage employee was running the show as superintendent and foreman that day.
Valmont-Olivier filed a workers' comp claim against Enviro Staffing in Massachusetts. It settled. He then sued Envirovantage for negligence in Maine in May 2023.
Envirovantage sought summary judgment, citing Maine's workers' comp statute, which grants employers that use a staffing agency the same immunity they enjoy with their own employees – so long as the agency has secured comp coverage. Valmont-Olivier conceded the point: if Maine law applied, Envirovantage walked.
But Maine law didn't apply. That was step one of the court's analysis.
Under Maine's most-significant-contacts-and-relationships test, the court looked at who actually had a stake in the immunity question. The injured worker was a Massachusetts resident. He collected Massachusetts workers' comp benefits. The staffing firm did business in Massachusetts. Envirovantage was a New Hampshire corporation. No Maine resident was a party. Maine's only link was the job site and the injury. The court leaned on the First Circuit's Robidoux v. Muholland decision, which it described as premised on almost identical facts, and ruled Massachusetts law applied.
That brought a different doctrine into play, and it sank the immunity defense.
Massachusetts uses a two-part Lang test for whether a host employer – what the state calls a special employer – gets comp immunity. The host must be the worker's direct employer, and an insured person liable for paying workers' comp benefits to that worker.
The direct-employer prong was conceded. The liability prong was the fight.
The General Staffing Agreement between the two companies said Enviro Staffing would pay wages, withhold taxes, provide comp coverage, and handle comp claims. Envirovantage would supervise on site and pay weekly invoices. A handwritten note added that if Enviro Staffing's comp coverage ever lapsed, it would pull workers off the site and Envirovantage could deduct premium costs from what it owed.
Envirovantage argued that since the comp premiums were baked into the invoices, it was effectively liable for the coverage. The court rejected that, pointing to its earlier Numberg v. GTE Transport, Inc. ruling: a host that pays the staffing firm an amount tied to the cost of providing comp benefits hasn't taken on legal liability for those benefits. It's just paying the bill.
Envirovantage also flagged its own separate Maine workers' comp policy. The court wasn't persuaded – the company couldn't point to any Massachusetts case making a host's own comp policy relevant to the Lang test when the host-staffing relationship is in play.
There was a route that would have worked, and the court mapped it out. In Mareiro v. N. Coast Sea-Foods Corp. and Moura v. Cannon, the staffing firms carried an alternate employer endorsement on their comp policies – an arrangement Massachusetts courts have held does extend immunity to the host. There was no evidence of such an endorsement here.
The lesson for insurers and risk managers: invoicing a host for the cost of comp coverage is not the same as making the host liable for comp benefits. If the goal is host-employer immunity, the staffing firm's policy needs an alternate employer endorsement and the contract needs to match. Without that, the host stays open to tort claims even after the worker has been paid through the staffing firm's policy.
The order denying summary judgment stands. The negligence case heads back to Maine Superior Court.
