July 7th, 2016
Coalition Lauds House Subcommittee for Taking Steps to Protect Main Street Businesses
Coalition to Save Local Businesses Executive Director Michael Layman released the statement below following the passage of the U.S. House Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee funding bill this morning, which includes a provision to save local businesses from further enforcement of the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) harmful and overly expansive “joint employer” policy:
“The NLRB’s joint employer standard has created an environment that effectively ensures a corporate takeover of Main Street. We know now that the government’s joint employer overreach is reducing the value of small businesses owners’ investments in the stores they built, and discouraging them from growing their businesses and providing more job opportunities. Thanks to the subcommittee’s action today, we are one step closer to stopping this misguided policy before it is too late. Whatever the intent behind this ill-conceived joint employer doctrine, it is clear that Main Street businesses are hurt far more than the big businesses that advocates claim to be targeting. We are optimistic that Congress has heard the concerns of locally owned businesses and will finally bring them needed relief this year.”
In its 2015 decision, the NLRB declared California-based recycling company Browning-Ferris Industries to be a joint employer with staffing services company, Leadpoint. This decision ignored more than 50 years of regulatory and legal precedent and retroactively adopted a far broader definition of joint employer than had ever been contemplated. Since the NLRB’s ruling, thousands of small business owners and members of the Coalition to Save Local Businesses have engaged their members of Congress in an effort to educate them about the impact on locally owned businesses.
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The Coalition to Save Local Businesses represents thousands of local businesses and millions of American jobs through its membership and partner organizations. The coalition’s goal is to inform Members of Congress and others about the negative consequences decisions by the National Labor Relations Board to expand the definition of who can be held as a joint employer would have on local businesses and their employees across the country. The coalition is asking Congress to support legislation that would make permanent the long-standing and widely accepted definition of joint employer.