The National Labor Relations Board on Dec. 14  reversed a joint employment standard set by the NLRB in 2015 during the Obama Administration that found companies were joint employers for collective bargaining with unions even if there is only reserved or indirect joint control of workers.

In the 2015 decision, the board ruled 3-2 that Browning-Ferris Industries of California was a joint employer for workers employed by staffing firm Leadpoint Business Services at BFI’s Milpitas, Calif., recycling site.

“In the Browning-Ferris case, the board majority held even when two entities have never exercised joint control over the terms and conditions of employment, and even when any joint control is not ‘direct and immediate,’ the two entities will still be joint employers based on the mere existence of ‘reserved’ joint control, or based on indirect control or control that is ‘limited and routine,’” according to the NLRB ruling on Thursday.

The new ruling returns to a previous NLRB standard for determining joint employment that requires proof that a company has exercised direct control over another company’s workers, according to the board.

In an announcement Thursday, the NLRB reported that “in all future and pending cases, two or more entities will be deemed joint employers under the National Labor Relations Act if there is proof that one entity has exercised control over essential employment terms of another entity’s employees (rather than merely having reserved the right to exercise control) and has done so directly and immediately (rather than indirectly) in a manner that is not limited and routine.”

The Dec. 14 decision to reverse the BFI standard was 3-2 and came in a separate case involving the firing of seven workers by Hy-Brand Industrial Contractors and Brandt Construction. An administrative law judge found Hy-Brand and Brandt were joint employers; Hy-Brand fired five employees and Brandt fired two employees after they stopped work based on concerns over wages, benefits and safety, according to the ruling.

The NLRB majority agreed with the administrative law judge that Hy-Brand and Brandt were joint employers, but it disagreed with how the judge reached his decision — setting up discussion to reverse the 2015 standard.

A dissenting opinion took aim at the ruling.

“Today’s decision represents a failure to engage in the reasoned decision-making required of administrative agencies by the Administrative Procedure Act,” NLRB members Mark Gaston Pearce and Lauren McFerran wrote in their dissent.

“This case is not a proper vehicle for reconsidering the joint-employer standard to begin with, and the majority’s failure to permit public participation only worsens matters,” according to the dissent. “Not surprisingly, a deeply flawed process leads to a deeply flawed result. The majority starts with a willful misunderstanding of the joint-employer standard adopted in BFI and ends by reverting to a standard that, before today, the board had never even attempted to justify in terms of the common-law principles that must guide us.”