Subcontractor injured in another company's switch room: health and safety duties do not end with your own employees

An employer's duty to ensure occupational health and safety (OSH) under Czech law applies to every natural person present at its workplace with its knowledge — including a self-employed person at the end of a subcontracting chain. A contract with a supplier that regulates health and safety does not relieve the employer of its statutory duties.

A company orders cleaning from a cleaning firm, which subcontracts window cleaning to a self-employed tradesman, who then suffers a serious electric shock in the client's building in an unlocked room marked "22kV". The client argued, among other things, that the injured man was neither its employee nor an approved subcontractor and that, under the contract, the cleaning firm was responsible for health and safety during cleaning. In its judgment of 30 September 2025, file no. 21 Cdo 1325/2025, the Czech Supreme Court rejected this defence. For anyone who lets cleaning, technology servicing, IT or maintenance into their premises, an uncomfortable conclusion follows: coordinating health and safety with external workers is not a voluntary extra. It is part of the company's own statutory duties, even towards people with whom it has no contract.

The expert article on which we rely does not state how the dispute ultimately ended. For practice, however, what matters more is the interpretation by which the court of appeal on points of law defined who is a protected person and what a workplace is. It defined both broadly.

The workplace does not end where the supplier contract begins

The basis of the rules is Section 101(1) of the Czech Labour Code: the employer ensures the health and safety of its employees with regard to risks to their life and health. Paragraph 5 of the same provision, however, extends the circle of protected persons to all natural persons present at the employer's workplaces with its knowledge. The Supreme Court added that neither the purpose of their presence nor whether they have a contractual or other legal relationship with the employer matters. An employee of another company is therefore protected just as much as a self-employed person working under an agreement with a subcontractor of the contractual supplier.

The interpretation of the term workplace is equally important. The defendant argued that during cleaning the premises became exclusively the supplier's workplace. The court rejected this. In its view, the employer's workplace comprises the premises in which the employer carries out its activities through its employees, including places related to those activities that it controls and in which outsiders present with its knowledge are exposed to risks. One place may therefore be the workplace of several employers at the same time. In the case at hand, the court took into account that the premises served the defendant's activities and were exclusively under its control. Moreover, the defendant's employee charged with supervising the cleaning knowingly allowed the external workers to be present and in fact directed their work: he instructed them to wash the windows in all rooms whose doors were open.

We consider the criterion of control and knowledge logical. Whoever controls the premises is the only one who can actually secure a hazardous room. A subcontractor at the end of the chain usually knows nothing about a switch room in someone else's building until someone warns him about it.

Coordinating health and safety with the supplier and the separate position of the self-employed

The Labour Code does not recognise "external worker" as a separate category. To set up health and safety for contractors, it is therefore necessary to distinguish who specifically performs the work. Most common are employees of an external supplier. Where employees of two or more employers perform tasks at one workplace, Section 101(3) and (4) of the Labour Code apply. The employers must inform each other in writing of the risks and the measures taken and cooperate in ensuring health and safety for all employees at that workplace. By written agreement, they may entrust one of them with coordinating the measures. Each of them, however, remains responsible for organising its own activities and its people's work so as to protect the employees of the others too.

In addition, under Section 103(1)(g) of the Labour Code, an employer at whose workplace employees of another employer work must ensure that, before starting work, they receive suitable and adequate health and safety information and instructions and information on the measures taken, in particular in case of fire, first aid and evacuation. It keeps documentation of what it has provided. The authors of the article stress that the written exchange of information on risks should not be a one-off form listing generic risks. It should be an ongoing transfer of information that reflects the actual state of the workplace.

The situation is different for a self-employed person who has no employer. Even so, he is not outside the system. Under Section 12 of Act No. 309/2006 Coll., Section 101(1), (2) and (5) and Section 102 of the Labour Code, among others, apply to him, taking into account the conditions and scope of his activities. These own duties of the self-employed person do not, however, exclude the parallel duty of the workplace operator. That is precisely where the defendant's defence failed.

A contract allocates tasks but does not erase the statutory duty

From a practical point of view, the most important conclusion is this: contractually transferring health and safety to a supplier does not relieve the employer of its duties under Section 101(5). The Supreme Court expressly stated that a contractual relationship between entities sharing a workplace does not release any of them from their own statutory duties, even if the contract expressly regulates their health and safety rights and obligations. A clause stating that "the supplier is responsible for the health and safety of its workers" therefore operates mainly between the contracting parties.

That does not mean the contract is worthless. According to the authors of the article, it should contain the allocation of specific organisational tasks, the duty to pass on information about risks, rules for engaging subcontractors, requirements for the professional or medical fitness of persons and the duty to respect the operator's internal rules. Such provisions operate mainly in the contractual relationship between the parties. Towards the injured person and towards the state, however, they do not take over the statutory duties of the workplace operator. The article does not state the specific amount of penalties for breaches of health and safety rules, so neither do we. But the risk of inspection and liability for harm does not disappear.

Moreover, a contract alone secures nothing. Under Section 102 of the Labour Code, the employer must identify and evaluate risks and take measures to eliminate or limit them. The case at hand shows that the problem was not only the external worker's lack of information. The hazardous room remained physically accessible and was not adequately secured. According to the authors' description, the person charged with supervision also stayed in one place during the cleaning and did not actually supervise the external workers. A signed induction form is therefore not enough. What will matter is whether the measures correspond to real risks and actual operations. For subcontractor safety on the client's premises, in practice this means knowing who enters the site and for whom they work, appointing a contact person, locking or otherwise separating hazardous areas and actually exercising supervision.

The authors also warn against the opposite extreme. For operations with many short-term entries, such as distribution centres visited daily by drivers of various carriers, the judgment, in their view, probably cannot be read as meaning that the duties do not apply to these entries. At the same time, it does not follow that every driver must undergo the same comprehensive training as permanent staff. The scope of measures should correspond to the nature of the activity, the length of stay and the risks. For a carrier's employee, this means suitable and adequate information and instructions, not automatically familiarisation with all internal regulations. We agree with this distinction. Formally retraining everyone who drives through the gatehouse would not increase safety; it would only bury it in paper.

An external worker's injury and the limits of statutory insurance

By extending protection under Section 101(5) to the self-employed, the judgment does not make them employees of the workplace operator. Under Section 271k of the Labour Code, a work injury is damage to the health or death of an employee in the performance of work tasks or in direct connection with them. The authors infer from this that the employer's statutory liability insurance for work injuries does not, as a rule, apply to the self-employed, even if the self-employed person was in fact performing dependent work for the supplier, i.e. under disguised employment (švarcsystém). They rely on an earlier Supreme Court conclusion that statutory accident insurance does not cover even an injury in a de facto employment relationship without a valid basic employment relationship.

The operator may nevertheless be liable for the harm. According to the judgment, a breach of health and safety duties may give rise to an obligation to compensate harm under civil law. Such a claim, however, is not covered by statutory insurance. We therefore recommend checking whether your commercial liability insurance also covers bodily injury to external workers at your workplace and under what conditions. It is also worth reviewing supplier contracts and internal regulations from the perspective the Supreme Court took: who controls the premises, who knows that the external worker is present and who gives him instructions. If these answers lead to your company, the duty lies with it too. We handle the setting up of contracts and internal rules as part of our employment law practice.

Source: Czech Supreme Court, judgment of 30 September 2025, file no. 21 Cdo 1325/2025, as discussed in the expert article "BOZP nekončí u vlastních zaměstnanců: povinnost zaměstnavatele vůči externistům" (in Czech), Právní prostor, 21 October 2026.