On February 26, 2020, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)
issued its final rule on the standard for determining
joint-employer status under the National Labor Relations Act. This
long-anticipated final rule comes nearly a year and a half after
the NLRB published the proposal for a new joint employer rule, and
follows a lengthy comment period and several high-profile cases
relating to the joint employer standard.
History of the Board's Joint-Employer Rule
The NLRB's joint-employer standard has had a complicated
history over the past several years. In 2015, during the Obama
administration, the Board overruled
more than 30 years of precedent and expanded the joint-employer
standard. In that 2015 case, Browning-Ferris, it held that
two entities could be joint employers based on the mere existence
of reserved joint control or based on indirect control, even when
such control is "limited and routine." This meant that
the NLRB could find that an entity was a joint
