McDonald's Wins A Food Fight article published in 40th Anniversary Issue of ABA Franchise Law Journal

Friday, September 4, 2020, at 16:51.

Michigan legal expertise was on display this month with the publication of an article in the 40th Anniversary Symposium Issue of the American Bar Association Forum on Franchising's Franchise Law Journal (FLJ). Three Michigan attorneys wrote the article titled Joint Employers and the National Labor Relations Board: McDonald’s Wins a Food Fight, namely Sally Lee Foley who prefaced the work authored by Thomas L. Gravelle and Nicolas Guibert de Bruet. This special issue of FLJ (Volume 40, Number 1, Summer 2020) featured publications from all the surviving past FLJ Editors-in-Chief.

The article discusses the consequences of over-regulating the workforce in a franchise system, using flexible administrative agency powers. Indeed, easy-to-enact changes to long-standing joint employment regulations at the United States National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) threatened the very existence of a viable business model for franchise systems in the United States. The NLRB regulates labor union activity by employers and employees in the United States. FLJ readers come to know that regulating a franchisor as a joint employer of its franchisee's employees conflates the economically-necessary separation of employer rights/liabilities between the franchisor and its franchisee, to the detriment of both. What ensued at the NLRB was a legal saga (in the case of McDonald’s USA, LLC, a joint employer, et al.) full of twists and turns that laid bare the importance of elections, the vigilance of lawyers and the flexibility of administrative law bodies.

Sally Lee Foley is a retired attorney in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. From 1973 to 1975, she championed consumer protection laws as Assistant Attorney General in the Consumer Protection Anti-Trust Division of the Department of the Attorney General of the State of Michigan. Subsequently, she advocated for clients in private practice. She has previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Franchise Law Journal (then known as the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal of the Forum Committee on Franchising) from 1982 to 1984, member of the Governing Committee of the ABA Forum Committee on Franchising, co-chair of the fourth (1981, Chicago, Illinois) and tenth (1987, Tucson, Arizona) Annual Meetings of the ABA Forum Committee on Franchising and president of the National Association of Women Lawyers.

Thomas L. Gravelle is an attorney and an arbitrator in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He is the original author of the Michigan Pleading and Practice volume (8A) on alternative dispute resolution. He is a well-known labor law arbitrator.

Nicolas Guibert de Bruet is a business and technology sectors attorney in Birmingham, Michigan.