It’s hard to fathom that the joint employer question/issue, first created under the Obama administration with the NLRB Browning-Ferris decision back in 2015, is still unresolved all these years later. As we advised last week, the NLRB and the Department of Labor have both issued a “final rule” re-establishing the historical definition of joint employer. But, in response to those “final determinations”, the democratic Attorneys General of 17 states across the country plus the District of Columbia have yet to ‘give up the ghost’ and just last week filed a new federal lawsuit in US District Court for the Southern District of New York challenging the joint employer definitions. According to the lawsuit, the DOL rule would make it harder to hold businesses liable for wage and overtime violations by franchisees and would thereby “impermissibly narrow” the scope of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Consequently, the suit contends, workers would be made “even more vulnerable to underpayment and wage theft.”