Why "is a business" is the load-bearing finding

The statutory-employer analysis asks whether the work being done was part of the putative employer's trade, business or occupation. Applying that to a community association requires treating the association as carrying on a business at all.

The court did. Maintaining, operating and servicing the property is the association's trade, and a worker doing that work is doing the association's work — even though the association contracted the function out.

That reasoning is not confined to timeshares. Its logic reaches an ordinary condominium regime or planned community that engages a management company or a maintenance contractor, because the same structural facts are present: the association's function is operating and maintaining the property, and the work is contracted rather than done by direct employees.

What follows, in both directions

• A tort claim against the association by a contractor's injured worker may be barred, with workers' compensation the exclusive remedy, even where the association employs nobody and carries no policy of its own.
• The immunity depends on someone holding coverage. The amended Section 42-1-415 preserves immunity where the immediate employer has it — which makes the contractor's or manager's coverage status the fact the outcome turns on.
• It is a jurisdictional dismissal, not a defence on the merits. The case was dismissed for lack of subject-matter jurisdiction rather than resolved on negligence.

The exposure this does not touch

Statutory-employer immunity answers a claim by a worker. It does not answer a claim by an owner, a guest, or a member of the public injured on common property, and it does not reach claims that are not about workplace injury at all.

A separate decision in the same window shows where association liability to residents can be created rather than excluded. In Meusel v. Woodside Plantation Property Owners' Association, 2026-UP-401, filed August 5, 2026, the Court of Appeals reversed a dismissal where homeowners alleged a community entity had voluntarily undertaken to stop harassing conduct by third parties and then did nothing. Whether a duty was voluntarily assumed is a question of fact.

The two decisions together describe a boundary: the association's exposure to the people who work on its property is channelled into workers' compensation, while its exposure to the people who live there can be enlarged by what it promises them.

Insurance context

South Carolina imposes no statutory insurance requirement on community associations. What an association carries — general liability, directors and officers, workers' compensation where it has direct employees — is set by its declaration and by lender or contractual requirements. A bill that would have made directors-and-officers coverage mandatory, H. 5204, died in committee this term.

See South Carolina insurance requirements for associations.