McDonald’s Fights Feds For The Soul Of Its Business Model

The Daily Caller speaks with Trey Kovacs on the McDonald's National Labor Relations Board joint employment trial. 

“These hearings are scheduled to go on for six weeks so it’s really unknown what’s going to be revealed,” Competitive Enterprise Institute Scholar Trey Kovacs told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “It’s fairly unheard of to basically bring someone to court and say we’re not going to tell you why we’re charging you as a joint-employer. They basically said you know why you’re a joint-employer so we shouldn’t have to tell you.”

“Its really unknown what exactly they are going to focus on,” Kovacs continued. “I think one of the points they’re going to make is the due process argument that they’ve never been told why they’re a joint-employer and that they haven’t been given adequate time to defend themselves. I think that’s going to be one avenue that they’re going to go to fight the NLRB hard on.”

“They use terms like economic realities and indirect and potential control,” Kovacs noted. “So really when they could have clarified what a joint-employer is and here is a five point test to determine it to make it very clear so employers know how they could run their businesses to know what liabilities they have over franchisees and contractors they decided against that.”

“One of the things that they said made Browning-Ferris and Leadpoint joint-employers is that Browning Ferris required drug tests of Leadpoint employees,” Kovacs also noted. “So they said that was enough control over the hiring practice for them to be declared joint-employers. But … we’re not going to know what a joint-employer is until a couple of these case come out and even then they say we’re going to determine this on a case-by case basis, they can come up with new reasons to label you as a joint-employer as they go along.”

Read the full article at the Daily Caller.