This week, the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (HELP) held a hearing to urge the Senate to support legislation to roll back a recent National Labor Relations Board decision. The NLRB decision could “steal the American dream from owners of the nation’s 780,000 franchise businesses and millions of contractors, said Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander (R-TN) in his opening remarks.”
“It is the biggest attack on the opportunity for small businessmen and women in this country to make their way into the middle class that we’ve seen in a long, long time – and I am committed to fighting it with legislation that already has 45 Republican cosponsors in the Senate and bipartisan support in the House,” Chairman Alexander said.
Chairman Alexander last month, along with House Education and Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN); Senate Labor Subcommittee Chairman Johnny Isakson (R-GA); and House Subcommittee Chairman Phil Roe (R-TN) introduced the Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act to roll back the NLRB ruling and reaffirm an employer must have “actual, direct and immediate” control over an employee to be considered a joint employer–the same standard that was in place decades before the board’s Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) decision.
The Senate bill, S.2015 has 45 cosponsors, and the House bill, H.R. 3459 has 71 cosponsors. The Protecting Local Business Opportunity Act (S. 2015) would roll back the NLRB ruling and reaffirm that an employer must exercise actual, direct and immediate control over essential terms and conditions of employment.
According to Chairman Alexander, for over three decades, federal labor policies have held that two separate employers are “joint employers” if both have direct and immediate control over employment terms and working conditions. Under the new “joint employer” standard adopted in August in Browning Ferris Industries, a 3-2 NLRB majority said that merely indirect control or even unexercised potential to control working conditions could make a franchisee and franchisor joint employers.
