This week, House Republican leadership was forced to pull the SWACCA-opposed “Save Local Business Act” (H.R. 4366) from floor consideration after SWACCA and its allies urged pro-labor Republicans to oppose the bill. These Republicans made it clear to leadership that the bill would be defeated on the floor if it was brought to a vote. H.R. 4366 seeks to substantially curtail the instances in which a company may be deemed a joint employer in relation to the employees of another entity, like a subcontractor, such that it would almost never be liable for misclassification of the subcontractor’s workers as independent contractors or other serious violations of federal employment laws.
The change of plans came after enough Republicans bucked leadership on the House floor earlier in the week to defeat the “Flexibility for Workers Education Act” (H.R. 2262) which would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) to provide that “voluntary” training workers do outside of regular working hours does not count as compensable “hours worked” for purposes of calculating whether an employee worked in excess of 40 hours a week to trigger overtime. This led GOP leadership to also postpone consideration of the “Empowering Employer Child Care and Elder Care Solutions Act” (H.R. 2270) to exclude the value of childcare payments and subsidized services from an employee’s regular rate used to calculate overtime pay and the “Tipped Employee Protection Act” (H.R. 2312) to revise the definition of a tipped employee under the FLSA to exclude consideration of an employee’s duties when determining if they are a tipped employee.