Mr. President, past, failed, job-killing measures are not a paradigm for future jobs creation! Your National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) efforts to scold job creating companies like McDonald’s for hiring contract workers will not yield more and better jobs. I know that you want to help unions, but I was a member of 3 unions, including the postal worker’s, elevator operator’s and carpenter’s unions, while earning my undergraduate degree at DePaul University, but none really helped advance my career. Unions do not create high paying jobs, companies do. It is simple microeconomics!
Your NLRB has yielded some of the most anti jobs measures in history. Case in point is their recent, very controversial decision against McDonald’s that is shifting the norm towards a temporary worker really being considered an employee of the parent company. This brings into question the long held standard for deciding when contractual business arrangements render one business a “joint employer” of workers employed by another. Prodding the NLRB to side with the unions changes the whole labor dynamic. These joint-employer cases are only one example of your misapplication of labor laws at a time when U.S. companies are increasingly turning to temporary workers.
According to the latest figures from the American Staffing Association an average of 3,000,000 temporary and contract workers are currently employed every week in the U.S. This is up 4% from 2012. If your NLRB succeeds in changing the standard of what is a temporary or contract employee, all types of businesses, including R&D, scientific, engineering, IT, technical and manufacturing clients that we represent as technical recruiters, could be affected. For example, franchisers like McDonald’s could be forced to manage labor practices and engage in collective bargaining in thousands of units across the nation. This will result in them hiring less NOT more employees!
However, there is a more systemic problem with these NLRB actions. Historically, companies first hire temporary or contract workers when the economy starts to improve. This is a low risk way to meet increased workloads. Furthermore, these temporary or contract hiring trends are a bellwether for both economists and executive recruiters like myself to determine future permanent hiring trends. Executive recruitment agencies, including R&D recruiters, scientific recruiters, engineering recruiters, IT recruiters, technical recruiters and manufacturing recruiters, regularly meet to discuss these trends. Even though most of us only recruit full time, permanent employees, this information is invaluable in helping us decide both: a) what our clients potential hiring plans will be and b) how many new recruiters for us to hire internally. More importantly, after a period of growth, using temporary or contract workers, major companies usually start hiring a lot more full time employees at high pay and great benefits. This is a time proven and historical trend.
Unfortunately, if you allow the NLRB to continue to mess with time proven, job-creating trends, employers will not respond by hiring more full time workers. Instead, they will not hire anyone at all!
What are your thoughts?
