Providing for Congressional Disapproval Under Chapter 8 of Title United States Code, of the Rule Submitted By the National Labor Relations Board Relating to ``Standard for Determining Joint Employer

Floor Speech

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Mr. BRAUN. Madam President, we have had several times recently--and I am talking about since the Biden administration came into office--to where, when you can't legislate, all of a sudden you use Executive orders and rulings.

You have heard of the deep state. That is what happens when you can't get your way legislatively, which means you have got to get 60 Senators corralled here to do it, and you start doing things--in many cases, pushing legal limits administratively. That is when government has gone wild.

I want to take you back to about a little over a year and a half ago when COVID was in the rearview mirror. If you remember, there was the effort to try to force vaccinations on every individual in the country working for an employer with 100 employees or more. That would have been almost everyone. You had folks in Indiana that owned businesses wondering, now that this was all in the rearview mirror: Why would you do it? It is government gone wild.

It was our office that dusted off the Congressional Review Act that said enough is enough. Of course, Speaker of the House Pelosi wasn't going to take it up there. We did pass it in the Senate. And thank goodness the Supreme Court came in about 2 weeks later and said: Enough is enough; that is unconstitutional.

We had to do it another time on all your hard-earned money you put into your investment accounts. You heard of ESG--environment, social, and governance--that that should be of equal value as return on investment. You know it shouldn't be. That is when you are trying to weave in ideology along with investment returns. We had to dust it off again. And that passed in the Senate and the House and generated President Biden's first veto.

The number of times we have had to do it since then--too many to count. We are doing it again here this evening.

I have led bipartisan letters to the NLRB, National Labor Relations Board, raising concerns about its proposed rule regarding joint employer status over the past couple years to no avail.

And what they are wanting to do--again, this is getting into Main Street, into small business, and leveraging that Executive power to do something that would mess up what has worked well for a long time.

This rule replaced the 2020 joint employer rule that focused on ``direct and immediate control'' as the criterion and replaced it with an ``indirect, reserved'' control standard, which means it is subjective; you can do whatever you want because you don't want that particular rule that would have kept it where it has always been and where it has worked.

It has caused confusion for franchise owners for years; in fact, franchisees just as bad. Those are the Main Street business owners. It would have immediate and long-term negative effects on millions of workers in thousands of businesses when the economy is already reeling from the inflation and the sugar-high economy based upon borrowed money spent to help few parts of it. That is what they have given us, and then they want to do this. Franchisors and franchisees, Main Street America, gets impacted by it.

Moving forward with this misguided rule, the NLRB would hurt entrepreneurs. That is the backbone of our economy. They are the ones who start things that someday may become a larger business. Thirty-two percent of small business owners say they would not have a business if it were not for franchising. The NLRB should not move forward with this joint employer rule because it will have a negative economic impact. It is actually inconsistent with common law. The Board should maintain the 2020 rule. It wasn't broken. It was working. They seem to be doing everything to try to fix it when it is not broken.

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