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Hooker v. Department of Transportation1/31/2002
ng to comply with safety regulations. He answered "probably" to the following two questions: (1) "Do you agree that if [the crane operator] had been given priority in the area he was working in and the [overpass] was flagged off, that he wouldn't have had to retract his outriggers to permit vehicles to pass?" and (2) "And if he hadn't retracted his outriggers, the crane wouldn't have become unstable and tipped over, correct?" A Caltrans transportation engineer on the project, whose responsibilities included bringing unsafe conditions to the attention of the resident engineer or the general contractor, conceded that if he had seen a crane operator retract the outriggers to permit vehicles to pass, he would have felt "odd" because the more the outriggers are extended, "the better the stability. That's simple physics."
Plaintiff, Hooker's widow, received workers' compensation benefits for his death from the contractor's insurer. Plaintiff also sued Caltrans on the theory Caltrans had negligently exercised control it had retained over safety conditions at the jobsite. Caltrans moved for summary judgment. The motion was based on the ground, among others, that a suit against a hirer of an independent contractor by an employee of the contractor for negligent exercise of retained control was barred by our decisions in Privette and Toland. The trial court granted Caltrans's summary judgment motion, but the Court of Appeal reversed. We granted review and limited the issue to be briefed and argued to the question whether, under our decisions in Privette and Toland, an employee of an independent contractor is barred from pursuing a lawsuit against the hirer of the independent contractor on the theory the hirer negligently exercised control it had retained. After review was granted, we issued our decision in Camargo, extending Privette and Toland to the tort of negligent hiring, and we then requested counsel to file supplemental letter briefs exploring the significance of Camargo for the question whether an employee of an independent contractor may bring an action for the tort of negligent exercise of retained control against the hirer of the contractor.
Discussion
I. The Rationale of Privette, Toland, and Camargo
In Toland, we summarized the peculiar risk doctrine and explained why we had concluded in Privette that under the doctrine a hirer's liability does not extend to the hired contractor's employees. "Under the doctrine of peculiar risk, a person who hires an independent contractor to do inherently dangerous work can be held liable for tort damages when the contractor causes injury to others by negligently performing the work. The doctrine serves to ensure that innocent bystanders or neighboring landowners injured by the hired contractor's negligence will have a source of compensation even if the contractor turns out to be insolvent. As we explained in Privette[, supra, 5 Cal.4th at page] 694, courts created the peculiar risk doctrine in the belief that `as between two parties innocent of any personal wrongdoing-the person who contracted for the work and the hapless victim of the contractor's negligence-the risk of loss occasioned by the contracted work was more fairly allocated to the person for whose benefit the job was undertaken.' [ ] In Privette . . . , we unanimously held that under the peculiar risk doctrine the hiring person's liability does not extend to the hired contractor's employees. Because the Workers' Compensation Act (Lab. Code, ยง 3200 et seq.) shields an independent contractor from tort liability to its employees, applying the peculiar risk doctrine to the independent contractor's employees would illogically and unfairly subject the hiring person, who did nothi
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