Remember this famous phrase from the movie Jerry Maguire?:
That's a neat summation of this Obama National Labor Relations Border ruling expanding and distorting the definition of "employer" into functional bureaucratic (i.e. "It means whatever we say it means") meaninglessness, driven by nothing more than Big Labor greed:
The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) on Thursday handed down one of its biggest decisions....
i.e. biggest power grabs.
....of Barack Obama’s tenure, ruling that companies can be held responsible for labor violations committed by their contractors.
As in small companies that do work for larger companies. Independent franchisees and temporary employment agencies fall into this same general category.
While the ruling from the "independent" agency specifically deals with the waste management firm Browning-Ferris, the so-called “joint employer” decision could have broad repercussions for the business world, particularly for franchise companies.
Opponents of the action warn the ruling could hurt businesses as diverse as restaurants, retailers, manufacturers and construction firms, as well as hotels, cleaning services and staffing agencies.
How would it do that? Let us count the ways.
Let's say you own a small business that does subcontracting work. The Obama NLRB has now declared that your employees are not your employees, they are, for collective bargaining purposes, employees of the larger company for whom you are doing subcontracting work. Because the larger company is a bigger and easier union target, they will now be forced to collectively bargain for your employees who are not your employees. This will be hugely onerous and expensive.
However, the larger company will not get stuck with the ultimate price tag for all the goodies Big Labor wins for your employees who are not your employees - you will. It will also force you to create your own legal and human resource departments in order to keep your ass out of court and out of jail. More than likely, it will force you out of business altogether, after which you can - perhaps - go to work for the larger company for which your former smaller company had been doing subcontract work and enjoy the fruits of the forced collective bargaining hijacking the NLRB forced upon you. If, you know, that larger company is hiring.
And, of course, the larger company might well decide to save itself the hassle and headaches and just terminate your subcontracting contract instead and not offer such contracts going forward.
The biggest target of this Big Labor putsch?
Yeah, you'd better run, Ronald. You and the 80% of your restaurants owned and operated by now-formerly independent franchisees. But then there's no escape from the Collective....
....not even for the mighty Golden Arches.
Better enjoy those Sirloin Third-Pounders while you can, folks. That "limited time only" tag is more limited than you might think.
And the ripples of depressionary job destruction will spread out from there:
In so doing, the board’s Democrat majority reversed several decades of practice where companies had to exercise “direct and immediate” control over workers with a new regime in which regulators will examine each case for signs a company has the potential to affect pay and working conditions. It will have a large impact on how franchisers like McDonald’s do business, since they can potentially be held liable for hiring and firing decisions by any of their thousands of individual franchisees and even routine business decisions will be examined in light of how they affect union organizing efforts.
“If this goes into effect then the franchiser has to step in and have a standard for hiring, human resources, payroll, everything,” said Jania Bailey, a board member of the International Franchising Association and chief executive of FranNet, a consulting firm that matches franchisees and franchisors. “It basically nullifies this independent business model.” [emphases added]
....in favor of a centralized, regimented "business" model that is much easier for the federal government to fascistically control.
As I've quipped on many previous occasions, when the last private sector job has finally been destroyed and we are all at his mercy, Barack Obama will stride like a colossus into the Rose Garden or East Room or out from behind his favorite shrimp shack to the presidential seal-festooned podium and triumphantly declare, "I have now achieved full employment!"
By which he will mean public sector employment for the Democrat Party elite. The rest of us can "just eat cake" I guess. Or whatever else we can dig out of the White House dumpsters.
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