Summer hiring: what the law requires for temporary workers and where prevention breaks
Summer empties the offices and fills the shop floor with unfamiliar faces. Holiday cover, seasonal reinforcements, students on their first contract, agency staff who arrive on Monday and start on Tuesday. For HR it is a scheduling exercise. For whoever runs prevention it is something else: people who do not yet know the job, exposed to risks nobody has had time to explain.
And that is exactly where an uncomfortable pattern shows up.
The law does not tell permanent and temporary staff apart. Organisations sometimes do
Spain offers a clear example of a principle that recurs across jurisdictions. Article 28 of its Occupational Risk Prevention Act is blunt: workers on fixed-term contracts, temporary agreements or supplied by a temporary work agency are entitled to the same level of protection as everyone else. Not a similar one. The same.
That means information about the hazards of their post, the training the job demands and appropriate health surveillance before they start, not the week after. When a staffing agency sits in the middle, Royal Decree 216/1999 splits the duties between the agency and the user company and leaves little room for arguing over who answers for what.
If your own country works differently in the detail, the underlying obligation rarely does: a temporary worker is not a second-class one. What changes in summer is only the speed at which you have to prove it.
The risk is not the contract type, it is what there is no time to pass on
A worker with six months behind them knows where the exits are, which machine pulls, where the blind spot on the loading dock is. Someone who arrived on Monday does not. That gap between knowing a hazard exists and recognising it in time is where a large share of first-week accidents sit.
This is not about attitude or age. It is about familiarity. And familiarity cannot be improvised: it is built with concrete information about the post and with training that moves from theory to the actual practice of the task, not a generic video signed off in a hurry.
Look at it from the other side. If you operate a forklift you do not know, in a warehouse you are walking for the first time, surrounded by colleagues whose names you have not learned, your margin for error narrows on its own. Prevention exists to widen that margin before anyone has to rely on it.
Training and assessment: the two points summer stresses
The risk assessment for a post has to reach whoever occupies it today, whoever that is. If your assessment describes the exposure of each post precisely (and not the average of the site), onboarding a new person is a matter of hours. If it does not, every temporary hire is a small step into the dark.
An ordered method helps here. Running the assessment with a methodology such as NTP-330 forces you to write down what risk each task carries and how severe it is, which is exactly what a newcomer needs to know before touching anything.
An honest question, the kind worth asking in June rather than August: does your training plan, as it stands today, absorb a spike of twenty new hires in two weeks?
More people and more contractors: coordination multiplies
Summer does not only bring temporary contracts. It brings maintenance done while the plant is idle, projects racing to finish before September, contractors coming and going. Each with its own paperwork, its own workers and its own hazards.
Coordinating all of that by hand, in the middle of the prevention team’s own holiday season, is a recipe for losing the thread. Having contractor documentation validation resolved and up to date stops an outside operator ending up on the job before anyone has checked they are covered.
From a protocol to one you can prove
A labour inspector does not ask whether you meant well. They ask whether the temporary worker got their training, whether they knew the hazards, whether their medical check was done. And they ask for dates.
That traceability, kept by hand and in August, is fragile. Knowing at any moment who received which training, who has their health surveillance up to date and who should not be at their post yet is exactly the kind of control that digitalising prevention turns into routine instead of a last-minute scramble. It is also what sets the companies that do not improvise apart: they do not have less turnover, they have a system ready to absorb it.
Because the real cost of an accident does not care about contract types: the person pays first, then the company, in sick leave, in penalties and in everything that never shows up on an invoice.
At Sabentis we see every summer how this falls into place when training, assessment and health surveillance live in the same place and generate the evidence on their own. If you want to see how it would fit your seasonal hires and your real posts, book a demo: half an hour, with your own case on the table.
Your August workforce does not have to be less protected than your February one. It just needs a system that does not go on holiday with it.
