NLRB Rule Rewrites Decades-Old Standard

A ruling from the National Labor Relations Board in August has rewritten a 30-year-old standard defining what constitutes a “joint employer.”

The new rule says businesses need only exercise “indirect” control over workers to be named a party in labor disputes and negotiations, which makes it easier for contract workers and temporary employees to unionize.

“It’s certainly a game changer,” Teague Paterson, a partner at Beeson Tayer & Bodine, told Reuters. Paterson’s firm represents the union in the NLRB case. “Unions and workers have been frustrated by these triangulated relations that the board condoned in the past. It certainly opens the door to more organizing.”

In a standard formally adopted in 1984, a “joint employer” was defined as governing essential terms and conditions of employment, such as hiring, firing, discipline, supervision, and direction.

The new rule broadens “joint employer” to include companies with “indirect” control.

The ruling represents the latest attempt to answer the core question of who counts as an employee in an economy that is increasingly reliant on shift work, contract workers, and other temporary employees, Bloomberg News said reported.

In making its decision, the NLRB conceded it has not kept pace with an evolving workplace in which more workers are employed through temporary staffing agencies. The regulators cited in their decision a “dramatic growth in contingent employment relationships” that “potentially undermines the core protections of the act for the employees impacted by these economic changes.”

The decision, which came in a 3-2 vote on a case involving sanitation workers, split along party lines. Three Democrats voted in favor of the revised standard; two Republicans dissented. S