What Taft-Hartley Did to Joint-Employer Doctrine

Abstract

In the debate over joint-employer doctrine under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), a key premise is that, because of how the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 amended the NLRA, the NLRA’s joint-employer legal standard must be consistent with the common-law of agency. This paper argues that this premise is unsound. Taft-Hartley does not require the NLRA’s joint-employer legal standard to be consistent with the common-law of agency, and thus does not constrain how the National Labor Relations Board develops its joint-employer doctrine. To support this argument, the paper examines not only statutory text and legislative history, but also, among other sources, an original hand-coded dataset of National Labor Relations Board opinions issued in the decade before Taft-Hartley. The paper then shows what its argument implies not only for the NLRA, but also many other similarly drafted statutes, such as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.