Ahead of a markup tomorrow morning in the House Education and Workforce Committee, SWACCA sent a letter to Committee leadership renewing its opposition to the Save Local Business Act (H.R. 4366). SWACCA has consistently opposed and helped to defeat the Save Local Business Act in previous Congresses, including during the 118th Congress. This legislation would amend both the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) 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.
In its letter, SWACCA explained that the bill’s narrow definition of joint employment under both the NLRA and FLSA “will place law-abiding employers competing on the basis of quality services, efficient execution, worker training, and innovation, at a competitive disadvantage to business that thrive at the expense of honest job creators, American workers, and the nation’s taxpayers.” As such, the Save Local Business Act “represents an effort to advantage one business model over another and an endorsement of a model promoting profits over the interests of America’s workers, taxpayers, and construction companies working hard to create middle class jobs and train the next generation of skilled construction craft workers.”
The full letter is available here.