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No. General liability covers injuries to third parties, customers, visitors, vendors, and explicitly excludes injuries to your own employees. Employee injuries belong to workers' compensation, which pays medical costs and lost wages regardless of fault, and to employers liability coverage, which defends lawsuits that fall outside the workers' comp system. A business carrying GL without workers' comp is uninsured for its most statistically likely serious claim.
Workers' compensation is a century-old trade: employees gave up the right to sue their employer for workplace injuries, and employers accepted automatic, no-fault responsibility for medical care and wage replacement. Because the statutory system handles employee injuries, GL forms exclude them entirely, the employers liability exclusion is among the oldest and most absolute in the form. The two systems are designed not to overlap, which is why carrying one does nothing to fill the other's role.
Part Two of a workers' comp policy, employers liability, handles the edge cases the statutory system does not: third-party-over actions, where an injured employee sues a manufacturer who then sues you; consortium claims by an injured worker's family; and suits alleging injuries outside comp's exclusive remedy. In the four monopolistic states, Ohio, North Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming, the state fund provides statutory benefits but no employers liability, so businesses there add stop-gap coverage to their GL to fill exactly this hole.
The most common way employers' injury exposure goes wrong is through uninsured subcontractors and misclassified workers. If your subcontractor's employee is injured and the sub carries no comp, the claim climbs to you in most states, and at audit, uninsured subcontractor payroll is charged to your policy as if those workers were yours. Treating 1099 status as an insurance strategy fails similarly: classification follows the work relationship, not the tax form. Certificate discipline on every sub, every job, is the protection.
In nearly every state, yes, with thresholds varying from the first employee to five employees, and special rules for construction. Texas is the lone state where most private employers can opt out, accepting unlimited injury-suit exposure in exchange. State-by-state requirements are covered in our state guides.
Workers' comp still responds, it is no-fault and follows employment, not blame. Auto injuries during work also implicate the commercial auto policy for third parties, but the employee's own injuries route through comp.
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