Your Client Worked Two Jobs on Base. Which Carrier Pays the Claim?
A logistics technician works for a prime contractor six days a week on a forward operating base in Afghanistan. On his one day off, he picks up shifts with a subcontractor running supply convoys between bases. He gets injured during a convoy. His prime employer says the injury happened on the subcontractor's time. The subcontractor says the injury resulted from fatigue caused by the prime contractor's demanding schedule. Both carriers deny the claim. Your client is caught in the middle.
Concurrent employment scenarios arise more frequently in overseas DBA work than most practitioners expect. The deployed environment creates conditions that push contractors toward multiple employers. Limited personnel, overlapping missions, and the practical reality of base life mean that workers often fill gaps across organizations. When an injury occurs, the question of which employer bears liability turns on facts that are harder to pin down than a single employment relationship would require.
ClaimTrove's database of 43,298 federal contract awards and 4,315 subcontract awards reveals how densely overlapping contractor operations become at overseas locations. Multiple employers sharing the same base, the same mission support functions, and often the same workforce pool creates fertile ground for concurrent employment disputes.
What Counts as Concurrent Employment Under the DBA?
Concurrent employment under the Longshore and Harbor Workers' Compensation Act (which the DBA incorporates by reference) exists when a worker simultaneously holds employment relationships with two or more employers. The employment relationships do not need to be identical in nature. A contractor can hold a full-time position with one employer and a part-time or intermittent position with another.
Three patterns dominate overseas concurrent employment scenarios. First, formal dual employment where a contractor holds written agreements with two separate employers. This is uncommon but does occur with specialized personnel like medical professionals or translators whose skills are in high demand. Second, informal supplemental work where a contractor picks up additional shifts or tasks for a neighboring employer on the same base. This is far more common and creates the messiest liability disputes. Third, rotational assignments where a subcontractor's employee rotates between prime contractors under different task orders.
The critical distinction is between concurrent employment and borrowed servant situations. In a borrowed servant arrangement, the worker remains employed by one entity but is temporarily directed by another. Concurrent employment means the worker has genuine employment relationships with multiple entities at the same time. The legal consequences are different, and misidentifying the relationship can derail a claim from the start.
ALJs evaluate several factors to determine whether concurrent employment exists: who pays the worker, who controls the work, who provides equipment, and whether separate employment agreements exist. ClaimTrove's OALJ decision database of 5,022 administrative decisions includes rulings that parse these distinctions in overseas contractor settings.
How Does Concurrent Employment Affect Average Weekly Wage Calculations?
Section 10 of the LHWCA provides the framework for calculating average weekly wage under the DBA. When concurrent employment exists, the statute permits combining wages from all concurrent employers to determine the AWW. This is a significant advantage for claimants because it can substantially increase the compensation rate.
The calculation is not automatic. The claimant must establish that the concurrent employment existed at the time of injury and that the wages from both employers should be included. For a detailed breakdown of how AWW calculations work in overseas settings, see our analysis of AWW calculation methods for overseas contractors.
Section 10(a) uses the actual earnings during the 52 weeks before injury. When a worker held concurrent employment throughout that period, earnings from both employers are included in the calculation. Section 10(c) provides a fair and reasonable alternative when 10(a) or 10(b) would not fairly represent the worker's earning capacity. ALJs frequently resort to 10(c) in concurrent employment cases because the earnings pattern is often irregular.
The practical challenge is documentation. Overseas concurrent employment frequently involves cash payments, informal arrangements, or work performed under a different contractor's task order without separate payroll records. Gathering wage evidence from multiple employers, especially when one or both may be hostile to the claim, requires early and aggressive discovery.
Which Employer's Carrier Is Liable for the Injury?
Liability falls on the employer whose employment caused or contributed to the injury. When a contractor works for Employer A in the morning and Employer B in the afternoon, and gets injured during Employer B's work, Employer B's carrier bears primary liability. The analysis gets complicated when the injury does not fall neatly within one employer's work period.
Cumulative trauma injuries present the hardest concurrent employment cases. A contractor who develops hearing loss, repetitive stress injuries, or respiratory conditions while working for two employers simultaneously creates a liability allocation problem. Both employers' work contributed to the condition. The last employer rule under the LHWCA assigns liability to the last employer whose employment exposed the worker to the injurious conditions. But in concurrent employment, both employers may qualify as the "last" employer.
Understanding the relationship between prime and subcontractor insurance obligations is essential here. When a subcontractor's employee performs work that benefits the prime contractor, the question of which entity was the employer at the time of injury can implicate both carriers.
Carrier disputes in concurrent employment cases often produce cross-claims between the two carriers. Each carrier argues the other employer's work caused the injury. These disputes can delay resolution for months while the carriers litigate among themselves. Practitioners should anticipate this dynamic and consider joining both carriers early to prevent the claimant from being caught between two denial letters.
What Unique Challenges Do Dual Employment Agreements Create?
Formal dual employment agreements are rare in overseas contractor work, but they do exist. Translators, medical professionals, and security consultants sometimes hold contracts with multiple employers operating on the same installation. These arrangements create documentation that can either help or hurt a DBA claim.
When two written employment agreements exist, the terms of each contract matter. Work schedules, job descriptions, and designated work locations all become evidence in determining which employer's work caused the injury. If Contract A specifies Monday through Saturday work and Contract B covers Sunday shifts, an injury on Sunday clearly falls under Employer B's coverage.
The more difficult scenario involves overlapping work hours or shared worksite responsibilities. A security contractor who monitors cameras for one employer and responds to alarms for another, all from the same guard post, creates a situation where both employers' work is occurring simultaneously. In these cases, the activity being performed at the moment of injury controls the analysis. An effective DBA client intake process should capture the details of all employment relationships, work schedules, and the specific activity at the time of injury.
Shared worksite injuries add another layer. When a contractor is injured by a hazard created by the other employer, such as equipment failure or an unsafe condition maintained by the other employer's operations, the liable employer may not be the one whose work the contractor was performing. The employer responsible for the hazardous condition may bear liability even if the contractor was technically performing work for the other employer at the time.
How Do You Identify All Employers and Carriers at an Overseas Worksite?
The first step in any concurrent employment DBA case is identifying every employer that operated at the injury location during the relevant time period. This is harder than it sounds. Overseas military installations and government facilities host dozens of contractors simultaneously. Personnel rosters change with contract cycles. Subcontractors come and go with task orders.
Federal contract records provide one avenue. USAspending data shows which companies held prime contracts for work at specific locations. Subcontract records, though less complete, reveal the secondary layer. But contract records alone do not tell you which employers your client actually worked for. That requires client interviews, pay records, and base access documentation.
For contractors who worked in Afghanistan, FOIA database results can reveal which employers were active at specific installations during specific time periods. ClaimTrove cross-references these records with carrier mapping data to build a complete picture of the employer and carrier landscape at a given location. Expat employees on permanent overseas assignments face additional complications in establishing concurrent employment when their secondary work falls outside the scope of their primary DBA-covered contract.
Once you identify the employers, tracing each employer to its DBA carrier for the relevant time period is the next challenge. Carriers change. Employers switch insurers every few years. A concurrent employment case spanning two employers means tracing two separate carrier histories for the same injury date. Getting either one wrong can mean filing against the wrong carrier and losing months to jurisdictional disputes.
ClaimTrove's investigation engine cross-references employer names against 2,454 carrier mappings, 43,298 contract awards, and FOIA database results to identify active employers and their carriers at specific locations and time periods. If you are handling a concurrent employment case and need to identify all employers and carriers active at your client's worksite, run your investigation through ClaimTrove to map the complete employer-carrier landscape.