I like similar but contradictory song titles. Pink Floyd has Wish You Were Here. But REO Speedwagon has Wish You Were There.

For one Puerto Rican company in the injection-molded products business, the message to its union was Wish You Were Gone (that’s Cosmo Pyke, 2017).  The company decided to outsource a portion of its injection mold production to a subcontractor but otherwise stayed in the business. The union filed an unfair labor practice charge.

The union won. The NLRB recently ruled that the company could not subcontract out work that had traditionally been performed by the union — at least not until the company had bargained over it and reached impasse. The Board ruled that once the union is performing a certain kind of work, a company’s decision to reconsider who performs this work is a mandatory subject of bargaining, so long as the company was remaining in the business. (The result likely would have been different if the company was getting out of that line of work.)

The Board noted that the company “remained an active participant in the production of injection-molded products, owned the machinery that manufactured the product, and continued to sell the product directly to the customers it served prior to its transfer of production to Alpla [the subcontractor].”

The moral of the story here is that — whether you wish the union were here, there, or gone — you need to bargain with it before subcontracting out its work. Exceptions may apply, depending on the facts and circumstances, but be cautious.

© 2018 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.

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