This page is about being injured on a construction site, not about a dispute over building work. If you were hurt on a job in Riverside, what decides the value of your claim is usually not whether someone was careless. It is who was careless, and whether your employer carried workers’ compensation insurance. Those two answers decide whether you are limited to comp benefits or can bring a full injury claim as well.
Hurt on a Riverside job site?
Who was responsible, and whether your employer was insured, decide what you can claim. One conversation establishes both.
Workers’ Compensation Is Not the Whole Picture
Against your own employer, workers’ compensation is usually the limit of what you can recover. It pays regardless of fault, which is its advantage, and it does not pay for pain and suffering, which is its limit.
There is one large exception, and it is worth checking in every case. If your employer did not carry workers’ compensation insurance, Labor Code 3706 lets you bring an action for damages against the employer directly, “as if this division did not apply”. And Labor Code 3708 then stacks the deck: the employer’s negligence is presumed, the burden is on the employer to rebut it, and it is not a defense that you were contributorily negligent, that you assumed the risk, or that a co-worker caused the injury. No contract can give those defenses back.
There is a narrow carve-out: the presumption in 3708 does not apply to some workers hired directly by a homeowner for work on their own residence, so it is worth confirming which side of that line you are on. And Labor Code 3715 lets a worker with an uninsured employer also file with the appeals board, so the two routes are not alternatives.
We do not take claims against an uninsured employer, and we are telling you about them anyway, because the deadline for that route is set by a different statute from the ordinary two years and it is easy to lose while you are looking at something else. If your employer was uninsured, get advice on it quickly from someone who handles those claims.
A claim under 3706 is a civil damages case, not a workers’ compensation claim. Whether the employer was actually insured is one of the first things worth checking, because it changes everything that follows.
Who Else Can Be Sued, and Which Ones Are Harder
A construction site is full of people who are not your employer. Some of them can be sued straightforwardly, and some start behind a presumption. Knowing which is which is the first real question in the case.
Companies that hired your employer start behind a presumption. Under a line of California Supreme Court decisions beginning with Privette v. Superior Court (1993) 5 Cal.4th 689, a business that hires an independent contractor is presumed to have handed responsibility for doing that work safely to the contractor. SeaBright Ins. Co. v. US Airways (2011) 52 Cal.4th 590 held that the delegation includes the duty to comply with workplace safety regulations. So if you work for a subcontractor, a claim against the general contractor or the site owner starts from a presumption against you.
It is a presumption, not a bar, and there are two well-established routes through it.
Retained control, from Hooker v. Department of Transportation (2002) 27 Cal.4th 198. A hirer is liable where it kept control over any part of how the work was done and negligently exercised that control in a way that affirmatively contributed to the injury. Importantly, the court said that contribution need not be something the hirer actively did: “There will be times when a hirer will be liable for its omissions,” and it gave the example of a hirer that promises to undertake a particular safety measure and then fails to. If the general contractor said it would provide fall protection, or the barricades, or the shoring, and did not, that is squarely within this route.
Concealed hazard, from Kinsman v. Unocal Corp. (2005) 37 Cal.4th 659. A landowner may be liable where it knew, or should have known, of a hidden hazard on the property that the contractor neither knew about nor could reasonably have discovered, and failed to warn. The “should have known” half matters: buried utilities, a prior failure recorded in the owner’s own files, or contamination the owner had been told about are all things an owner may be taken to have known.
Other defendants carry no such presumption, and they are often the more direct route: the company that supplied, rented or maintained defective equipment, a delivery driver, or another trade whose own work injured you. A manufacturer of a defective tool or machine is a different kind of claim again, most often brought in product liability, though negligent design, manufacture and failure to warn are available too.
Whichever of those defendants applies, one section is what lets you sue them at all. Labor Code 3852 is that section. A worker’s claim for compensation “does not affect their claim or right of action for all damages proximately resulting from the injury or death against any person other than the employer.”
That second claim is an ordinary personal injury case. It can include pain and suffering, full wage loss, and future care, none of which workers’ compensation pays for.
Then there is the part that confuses people most. The same section lets an employer who has paid compensation bring its own claim against that third party. A related section also lets it assert a lien against what you recover. That is why a settlement figure and the amount you actually receive are two different numbers, which have to be worked out rather than assumed.
What a Cal/OSHA Citation Can and Cannot Do
It is often said that a Cal/OSHA citation is powerful evidence in a construction injury lawsuit. That is not quite what the statute says, and the difference changes how a case is built.
Labor Code 6304.5 provides that neither the issuance of, nor the failure to issue, a citation by the Division has any application to, or may be admitted into evidence in, a personal injury or wrongful death action, except as between an employee and their own employer. It adds that the testimony of Division employees is not admissible as expert opinion or with respect to the application of the safety standards themselves.
The section opens by stating the Legislature’s intent that the safety standards apply “to proceedings against employers for the exclusive purpose of maintaining and enforcing employee safety”, which is the sentence a non-employer defendant will point to, and it closes by preserving the holding in Brock v. State of California (1978) 81 Cal.App.3d 752.
So the citation itself is generally not going in front of a jury in a claim against a third party. And its absence does not help the defense either, because failure to issue one is equally inadmissible.
What the same section does allow is the more useful half. It states that Evidence Code sections 452 and 669 apply to the safety orders “in the same manner as any other statute, ordinance, or regulation.”
Evidence Code 669 is the negligence presumption. Failure to exercise due care is presumed where:
- the person violated a statute, ordinance or regulation of a public entity;
- the violation proximately caused the death or injury;
- the injury was of the kind the regulation was designed to prevent; and
- the injured person was one of the class the regulation was adopted to protect.
A construction worker hurt when fall protection was missing will often meet the last two conditions, since those rules exist to prevent that injury to that person. The presumption is rebuttable, by proof that the defendant did what a reasonably prudent person wanting to comply would have done, so it is not the end of an argument. It is a good place to start one.
Read this together with the delegation point above. Against a company that hired your employer, SeaBright means the safety order does not by itself create a duty owed to you, which is why retained control or a concealed hazard is the thing to establish first. Once one of those is established, the safety order is back in play and can supply the standard of care in the claim. Against your own uninsured employer, or another contractor on the site with its own obligation under the order, it runs directly.
And there is one place that bar does not apply. 6304.5’s exception is “as between an employee and his or her own employer”, so in a Labor Code 3706 action against an uninsured employer a Cal/OSHA citation is not shut out the way it would be against a third party. That removes one obstacle rather than settling the question, since the ordinary rules of evidence still apply to it.
The practical consequence: what matters is identifying the specific safety order that was broken and proving the breach independently, not waiting to see whether an inspector writes a citation.
Was there a safety order in play?
The citation may not be admissible, but the standard behind it can be. That distinction is worth a conversation.
If It Was a Public Works Site
A road job, a school, a city building or any other project owned by a public entity adds a deadline. It does not replace the ordinary one, and this is worth being precise about: the six months attaches to the public entity as a defendant, not to the site. On a school or highway project the general contractor, the subcontractors, the equipment lessor and the manufacturer are all private, and every one of them is still on the ordinary two years.
Under Government Code 911.2 and Chapter 1.05 of the Riverside Municipal Code, a claim against the City for injury to a person must be presented within six months after the cause of action accrues. The City states it as six months from the occurrence.
City Clerk’s Office, City of Riverside, 3900 Main Street, Riverside, CA 92522.
It can be filed online through the City’s portal, in person or by US Mail, and the Office of the City Attorney processes it on (951) 826-5896.
The entity then has 45 days under Government Code 912.4, and Government Code 945.4 bars a lawsuit until the claim has been presented and the entity has either acted on it or is treated as having rejected it. A claim the entity ignores is deemed rejected once the 45 days are up.
And presenting the claim is not the last deadline. Once the entity mails or delivers a written rejection, Government Code 945.6 gives you six months from the date of that notice to file suit. If no written rejection is ever sent, the period is two years from accrual instead.
If the six months has already gone, Government Code 911.4 allows a late-claim application within a reasonable time and no more than a year after the claim arose, and Government Code 911.6 requires it to be granted on six grounds. Four matter most: mistake, inadvertence, surprise or excusable neglect where the entity was not prejudiced; that the injured person was a minor for the whole six months or any part of it; that they were physically or mentally incapacitated for the whole six months or any part of it; or that they died before the six months expired.
The two “any part of it” grounds carry their own deadline, and it is the half that gets left off: the application has to be made within six months of the person turning eighteen, or within six months of the incapacity ending, or a year after the claim accrued, whichever comes first.
And the one-year outer limit is not absolute. Under Government Code 911.4(c), time during which the injured person is mentally incapacitated and has no guardian or conservator is not counted toward that year. Time during which they were a minor is counted.
A refused application can go to the court under Government Code 946.6, within six months of the day it was denied or deemed denied, and if the court grants relief the lawsuit has to be filed within 30 days after that.
“Deemed denied” is the trap. The board has 45 days to grant or deny the application, and if it does nothing the application is treated as denied on that 45th day. So the six months to petition the court starts running from a date on which nothing arrives in the post. Waiting for a written refusal that never comes is how this deadline is missed.
A minor’s deadline is not the adult one, and the two routes differ. Code of Civil Procedure 352 pauses the ordinary two-year period while a person is under the age of majority or lacks legal capacity. Subdivision (b) says the section does not apply to an action against a public entity or public employee on a cause of action for which a claim has to be presented, so on that route nothing is paused: not the six months, and not the lawsuit deadline afterwards.
Not every public entity is the City. A county, a school district or a state project each has its own claims process.
What Actually Needs Preserving
Construction sites change daily, which makes the evidence here unusually perishable.
- The scene as it was. Scaffolding is struck, trenches are filled, and the configuration that caused the injury can be gone quickly.
- The equipment itself. A ladder, a lift, a saw or a harness, which is often repaired, returned to a rental company or discarded.
- The daily reports, toolbox talk records, sign-in sheets and subcontractor agreements, which establish who controlled the site and who was responsible for what.
- Photographs taken by anyone on site, including on phones, which get deleted.
- Site cameras, which can be overwritten within days or weeks.
A letter asking that all of this be preserved costs nothing, and it is the step that protects everything else on the list.
Riverside Construction Accident FAQs
How long do I have to bring a claim?
Two years from the injury under Code of Civil Procedure 335.1 for an injury claim against a third party. Six months to present a written claim if a public entity is involved, such as a city, county or school district project. Workers’ compensation runs on its own separate timetable and we do not handle those claims, so if you have one, get advice on it promptly from someone who does.
Can I bring a lawsuit if I am already getting workers’ compensation?
Often yes, and they are not alternatives. Labor Code 3852 says a compensation claim does not affect your right of action against anyone other than your employer. If a general contractor, another trade, an equipment supplier or a manufacturer contributed to the injury, that is a separate claim that can include losses workers’ compensation does not pay for.
Cal/OSHA cited the company. Does that prove my case?
Not directly, and this surprises people. Labor Code 6304.5 makes the citation itself inadmissible in an injury claim, except as between an employee and their own employer. What can be used is the safety order behind it: under Evidence Code 669, violating a regulation raises a rebuttable presumption of a failure to exercise due care where the violation caused the kind of injury the rule was meant to prevent, to someone the rule was meant to protect.
What if Cal/OSHA did not cite anyone?
That does not hurt you either, for the same reason. A failure to issue a citation is equally inadmissible under the same section. The case is built on the standard and the facts, not on the inspector’s decision.
What should I not tell the attorney?
Nothing. The conversation is confidential, and the facts that feel damaging, a prior injury, a gap before seeing a doctor, a share of the responsibility, are the ones that need handling properly rather than hiding. They surface anyway and are easier to deal with early.
Does my immigration status affect my claim?
No. Under Evidence Code 351.2, evidence of a person’s immigration status is not admissible in a civil action for personal injury or wrongful death, and discovery into it is not permitted either. It cannot be raised at trial and it cannot be asked about beforehand. It is not a question we ask you, and not one the other side gets to ask.
Contact a Culver Legal Riverside Construction Accident Lawyer
If anyone other than your employer contributed to your injury, or if your employer had no workers’ compensation insurance, you may have a claim that comp benefits do not cover. If a public entity was involved there is a separate six-month deadline to present a written claim to that entity, on top of the ordinary two years that applies to everyone else. Which one matters in your case depends on who is responsible, not on who owns the site. We speak Spanish. Call (310) 600-7881 at any hour. The review costs nothing.
Attorney Advertising. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Culver Legal, LLP is a California law firm. The information on this page is for general informational purposes and does not constitute legal advice.
