Donald Trump’s National Labor Relations Board and its counsel have made it their mission to roll back every advance for workers from the Obama years. The joint-employer rule—which makes companies responsible, under certain circumstances, for workers employed through franchises and staffing agencies—is a major piece of that. In the rush to roll back the joint-employer rule, ProPublica’s Ian MacDougall reports, the NLRB hired a staffing agency with a major conflict of interest to help make it happen.
This is actually the second time the Trump-era NLRB has run into a conflict-of-interest problem on this exact issue, the first being in 2018 when a board member voted on a case despite his prior work for a law firm that had represented a company involved. So what did the NLRB do when taking another run at making it easier for major corporations to evade responsibility for abuses happening on their premises, involving workers whose conditions the corporations largely control? It … hired a legal staffing agency to provide temporary lawyers and paralegals to review public comments on overturning a rule that applies to staffing agencies. “In essence,” MacDougall writes, “the NLRB hired temps whose bosses have a stake in the outcome to review and potentially summarize the public comments.”
Not only that, but NLRB chair John Ring told Congress that the contractor hired wouldn’t do “any substantive, deliberative review of the comments but will be limited to sorting comments into categories in preparation for their substantive review,” even though internal documents show that the plan all along was for the temporary staff to do substantive review. House Committee on Education and Labor Chair Bobby Scott and Rep. Frederica Wilson, chair of its labor subcommittee, have some questions about this.
That’s the Trump administration, and the Republican Party more generally: so in bed with big business that it’s a conflict of interest every time they try to do something. But their determination to screw workers keeps driving them forward.
This article was originally published at Daily Kos on September 17, 2019. Reprinted with permission.
