Legal requirements for employments of contractors

Legal occupational safety requirements for the employment of external companies

If you want to use external companies in your business, you will probably check their competences in advance and leave them with largely free hands after assignment. However, as far as occupational safety is concerned, the contractor must fully comply with all legal requirements.

This also includes the submission of a risk assessment according to the Occupational Health and Safety at Work Act (ArbSchG) and the Industrial Safety Regulation (BetrSichV).

Differences between external companies and temporary workers

In the employment of agency workers, responsibility and authority are entirely with the user undertaking. It must therefore ensure that temporary workers are made aware of potential dangers in the workplace and comply with occupational safety regulations. If external companies are commissioned for certain activities, such as inspections, maintenance or construction measures, the selection and supervision of their employees is thus left to them.

The parent and contractor company must furthermore inform each other about dangers, coordinate appropriate measures and make sure that the employees of the external companies have received sufficient instructions. However, upon notice of obvious defects and infringements, the client should and may intervene.

Great administrative effort

The administrative burden may be very large and tie up significant resources. Hence imagine, as an SME or as a large company, you plan to expand a factory floor. You will probably commission a construction company, an electrician, a heating engineer, machine technicians and a few other external companies, each of whom must deliver a risk assessment. This can consequently become rather confusing. So here, a software tool like OiRA offers intelligent support to cover all areas relevant to occupational safety.

With OiRA you maintain the perspective

The Online Interactive Risk Assessment (OiRA) helps you to create and carry out a risk assessment for any external company online in a fully uncomplicated way. Because OiRA is focused on occupational safety and risk assessment, you can forego using other programs and tools – such as word processing – as well as all sorts of paperwork.

With your smartphone, tablet or notebook, you can furthermore record your investigation results regarding possible sources of danger directly on site. In this way, all data is immediately available in digital form in the OiRA system and does not need to be retransmitted later. You can also query and evaluate every development step at any time and in any place within seconds.

OiRA provides legal certainty

OiRA similarly contains numerous samples, templates and practical modules to organize the themes of occupational safety and risk assessment, when contracting external companies. Moreover the implementation and documentation ensures that all legal requirements are met. So you are always on the safe side in case of disputes and other problems.