Earlier this month, the US Circuit Court for the District of Columbia ruled that the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) should revisit the ruling the board rendered two years ago regarding joint-employer status. A three-judge panel of the court determined that “the ruling for Browning-Ferris Industries Inc in 2020 failed to explain why it had applied a decades-old standard for determining when companies are so-called ‘joint employers’ of contract and franchise workers.” Essentially, the issue at hand stems from the original 2015 Browning-Ferris case where the Obama NLRB dramatically changed the joint employer standard to one where a ‘joint-employer’ needn’t exercise control to qualify as a joint employer so long as it retained the right to control. On appeal, the court ruled that “indirect control” could be sufficient but remanded the case to the NLRB with the instruction that it provide a blueprint for what counts as ‘indirect control’ over ‘essential terms and conditions of employment.’” The Trump NLRB in 2020 did not provide that blueprint but rather resurrected the original standard and without sufficient explanation (in the court’s view) reversed the 2015 decision. The court went on to note the NLRB’s changing precedent on joint employment and again instructed the agency to take a closer look at the proper standard to apply and more fully explain its reasoning. We can guarantee the explanation from the current labor-friendly Biden NLRB will be closer to the Obama standard than the Trump one.