Dive Brief:
- The American Hotel & Lodging Association praised the Senate’s Wednesday vote to overturn the National Labor Relations Board’s joint-employer rule.
- The Senate voted 50-48 to overturn the rule, which the House of Representatives voted to overturn in January. The bill to overturn the rule will now head to President Joe Biden’s desk.
- AHLA and other professional organizations in franchise-heavy industries have railed against the rule, which AHLA calls “job killing.” Though the organizations are increasingly garnering support from government officials, including a court in Texas that blocked implementation of the rule, the president is likely to veto, according to a January statement from his office.
Dive Insight:
In Wednesday's vote, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) crossed the aisle to side with Republicans and independents voting against the joint-employer rule.
“Today’s bipartisan Senate vote is a win for hoteliers and small business owners everywhere, and shows the rule is out of step with Congress, the courts, and America’s job creators,” said AHLA Interim President and CEO Kevin Carey, who took over for Chip Rogers last month, in a statement. “Lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate realize the administration’s joint-employer rule would acutely suppress job creation for hoteliers and other businesses, and therefore it needs to be abandoned.”
President Biden, however, has disagreed. In January, his office commented on the House’s bill to overturn the joint-employer rule, saying he would veto the bill if it came to his desk.
The rule would designate companies as joint employers of contract and franchise workers when they have control over working conditions like pay, supervision and scheduling, even if that control is indirect. For hotels, that would mean “larger hotel chains will have to get more involved at the property level on all things concerning employees,” Scott Greenberg, author of “Stop the Shift Show: Turn Your Struggling Hourly Workers Into a Top-Performing Team,” told Hotel Dive in January.
The NLRB rule was previously set to go into effect in December but was pushed back to address legal challenges. In the meantime, an Eastern District of Texas reinstated the governing body’s 2020 rule, which did not hold hotel groups jointly responsible for franchisees’ workers.
Other professional organizations including the International Franchise Association and the National Restaurant Association have spoken out against the rule.
