D.C. Circuit confusingly has affirmed the Obama Board’s Joint Employer doctrine

The D.C. Circuit has affirmed the Obama Board’s Joint Employer doctrine, which holds that “indirect” control is sufficient to establish Joint Employer status. The rule has proven to be exceptionally controversial and politically sensitive, so much so that the Trump Board has already announced it will be issuing a formal regulatory rule to address the issue.

While the dissent in the D.C. case would have preferred to remand the case and let the Board issue its own rule, the majority decided to tackle the issue head on, or nearly so, or actually not at all head on. Rather the D.C. Circuit’s decision has left employers, unions and individuals more confused than ever over the current status of the law.

The majority held that, as a general principle, the Obama Board had been within its rights to re-articulate the Joint Employer rule in a way that made “indirect” control sufficient to establish Joint Employer status.

We hold that the right-to-control element of the Board’s joint-employer standard has deep roots in the common law. The common law also permits consideration of those forms of indirect control that play a relevant part in determining the essential terms and conditions of employment. Accordingly, we affirm the Board’s articulation of the joint-employer test as including consideration of both an employer’s reserved right to control and its indirect control over employees’ terms and conditions of employment.

What exactly is “indirect” control? That’s been the issue throughout the evolution of this controversial issue, and unfortunately the D.C. Circuit offered no guidance. It simply chided the Board for not, itself, having offered such “legal scaffolding” and suggested that an appropriate standard will somehow distinguish between control over the “matters governing essential terms and conditions of employment” versus “those types of employer decisions that set the objectives, basic ground rules, and expectations for a third-party contractor.”

Employers, unions and individuals are left now to wait for the NLRB to issue its own rule. When the NLRB develops its own rule, one thing seems clear from the D.C. Circuit’s decision, it cannot simply ignore “indirect” control.

A categorical rule against even considering indirect control—no matter how extensively the would-be employer exercises determinative or heavily influential pressure and control over all of a worker’s working conditions—would allow manipulated form to flout reality.