In a win for organized labor, the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) reinstated a union-friendly standard under which both temporary and permanent employees may collectively bargain as a single unit without employer consent. On July 11, 2016, the NLRB’s 3-1 decision in Miller & Anderson, Inc., 364 NLRB No. 39 (2016), made it easier to combine workers who are temporarily employed by a staffing agency’s client company with workers permanently employed by that client company to form a union.
Under the new standard, if a staffing agency and its client company are deemed to be joint employers of the temporary workers, the temporary workers may join forces with the client company’s permanent workers, provided that they satisfy the “community of interest” factors demonstrating that it is appropriate to treat them as a single unit. Some of the factors used to determine whether a proposed unit of workers share a community of interest are whether the employees are subject to the same working conditions, are subject to common supervision, and have similar wages and benefit packages.
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