The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has ruled in favor of temporary staffing agency workers at a recycling plant who petitioned to have the plant’s owners, Phoenix-based Republic Services Inc., take part in a collective bargaining and union certification process.

The late August 2015 ruling involved a case filed by a chapter of the Teamsters union and concerning workers supplied by a Houston-based staffing agency to a materials recovery facility (MRF) in California that is operated by Republic Services Inc.

The MRF still carries the name of the predecessor Browning Ferris Industries (BFI) firm, so the case came to be referred to as “Browning-Ferris Industries of California Inc., d/b/a BFI Newby Island Recyclery, and FPR-II LLC, d/b/a Leadpoint Business Services, and Sanitary Truck Drivers and Helpers Local 350, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Petitioner.”

A 50-page downloadable file reviewing and explaining the decision can be found here.

The ruling was issued with the three Democratic board members voting in favor of recognizing Republic Services as a “joint employer” while the two Republican board members dissented from the decision.

In its news release announcing the decision, the NLRB says it has “refined its standard for determining joint employer status. The revised standard is designed ‘to better effectuate the purposes of the Act in the current economic landscape.’ With more than 2.87 million of the nation’s workers employed through temporary agencies in August 2014, the Board held that its previous joint employer standard has failed to keep pace with changes in the workplace and economic circumstances.”

The NLRB says “that two or more entities are joint employers of a single workforce if 1) they are both employers within the meaning of the common law; and (2) they share or codetermine those matters governing the essential terms and conditions of employment.”

The news release continues, “In its decision, the Board found that BFI was a joint employer with Leadpoint, the company that supplied employees to BFI to perform various work functions for BFI, including cleaning and sorting of recycled products. In finding that BFI was a joint employer with Leadpoint, the Board relied on indirect and direct control that BFI possessed over essential terms and conditions of employment of the employees supplied by Leadpoint, as well as BFI’s reserved authority to control such terms and conditions.”

The NLRB case stems in part from a Teamsters attempt to unionize the workers. The NLRB decision defines the workers at the MRF as those “who manually sort the material on the streams (sorters), clean the screens on the sorting equipment and clear jams (screen cleaners), and clean the facility (housekeepers). The union seeks to represent approximately 240 full-time, part-time, and on-call sorters, screen cleaners and housekeepers who work at the facility.”

With its late August decision, the NLRB ordered that “within 14 days the union certification ballots that were impounded on April 25, 2014, shall be counted and the appropriate certification issued.”

Following the ruling, labor unions and employers’ associations issued starkly different reactions to the ruling. “This decision may very well signal the beginning of the end of outdated laws that fail to address an economic structure tilted against working people,” states AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka in a statement posted to the union’s website. “It means more working people can engage in meaningful collective bargaining by bringing all parties who control their wages and other conditions of employment to the table.”

Randy Johnson, U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior vice president for labor, immigration and employee benefits, warned of additional burdens placed on employers. “Because of the array of obligations and liabilities that attach with a finding of joint employer status, the Browning-Ferris case could lead many employers to significantly alter or limit the contractual agreements into which they enter," says Johnson. “This will reduce employer flexibility and competition at a time when the economy continues to experience anemic economic growth.”