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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious how liability works in this situation and when it ends? It sounds like you were operating as a general contractor. Were you paying the roofers salary or did you have a business to business relationship?

Relatedly, someone was telling me what workers insurance is 1% of construction costs for large infrastructure like building hospitals.

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I’m technically an owner builder. I have a workman’s comp policy that ranges from 10-40% of payroll depending on the task. For a residential project I can definitively say insurance is way more than 1% of total cost. Eg for the sake of round numbers, let’s say labor is 50% of the total. If I take the absolute lowest percent of what I pay for insurance, we already are up to 5%.

This is separate from liability insurance for say negligence if I got sued. I hope my umbrella policy would cover me here but I found in my situation it is a bit confusing. An insurance broker struggled to give me clear answers

That doesn't surprise me. I imagine that construction labor is a lower fraction of expenses for very large projects, as well as real risk, and overhead.

In the conversation, they told me that their #bigco was able to save X hundred million a year by creating their own insurance company and requiring all of their contract builders to use it.

The people with money become liable.

Thats not a very useful heuristic. There are numerous relationships that effectively shield liability, and many of these make perfect sense.

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