– Me, to my mostly adult kids, on Friday (and the day before that, and the day before that, and the day before that…)

The text above should be no surprise to any of you who have elected to reproduce. Our offspring live in the stone ages. They do not understand the concept of an electric dishwasher. They are pre-Edison old school. If everything goes in the sink, they know that I will be the washer of the dishes.

For years, I have been sending the same message, usually face-to-face. It never gets through. But I keep trying and maybe, just maybe, one day we’ll get to the right result.

Same goes for the National Labor Relations Board and its repeated efforts to unravel the 2015 Browning-Ferris decision on joint employment.

Ah, yes, remember the Browning-Ferris case? Remember how in 2015, the Dem-controlled Board tried to rewrite the test for joint employment? The Board rejected 30 years of Board law and decided that indirect and reserved control would be enough to make someone a joint employer.

In 2017, the Board later tried to undo the Browning-Ferris decision but failed and — sorry, my bad — had to reinstate it. The case went to the Court of Appeals and then came back to the Board. But the Board it came back to is a more pro-business, Republican-controlled Board than the 2015 Board that issued the original decision.

Last week, the Board (for a second time) retracted the 2015 Browning-Ferris ruling. This time, the Board ruled that it had been “manifestly unjust” for the 2015 Board, after making up its new test, to apply that new test retroactively to Browning-Ferris Industries.  Cheers to that!

In last week’s ruling, the Board did not formally revoke the 2015 test, but it didn’t have to.

That’s because in February 2020, back in an era when mankind could roam the earth freely without hiding their lips, the Board issued a new test. The new test requires direct and immediate control before a company can be deemed a joint employer.

More information about NLRB’s new test is here, including a Q&A. For now, this is the test for joint employment under the National Labor Relations Act. A finding of joint employment requires direct and immediate control.

Before you go back to your home office all content and happy that you learned something already today and it’s not even coffee o’clock yet, remember — the NLRB test is not the full story when it comes to joint employment. The DOL has a different test for Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) disputes, summarized here.  And the courts may or may not apply either of these agency-created tests. As discussed here, there’s a lawsuit filed by 18 states that challenges the legitimacy of the DOL test.

So the Browning-Ferris case may be finally done (or maybe not). At least for now, it seem done. But what’s not done is the jousting and pivoting over the various tests for determining who is a joint employer. That battle rages on.

Much like my personal battle to fill the dishwasher at home.

© 2020 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.