Labor Department proposes joint-employer rule, impacting monday.com vendor and contractor ties

A rule that sounds technical could force monday.com to tighten how it manages agencies, contractors and partners across regions. The U.S. Department of Labor proposed a joint-employer standard on April 22, and the change could reshape who is treated as responsible for wages, leave, supervision and compliance when work is shared across companies.

The proposal, published in the Federal Register on April 23 under RIN 1235-AA48, covers joint-employer status under the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act. The comment period runs through June 22. The department says the goal is to restore clearer guidance after years of shifting interpretations and to bring more consistency across those statutes.

For monday.com employees, the practical risk sits in the ordinary machinery of modern SaaS operations. A company with more than 250,000 customers worldwide depends on vendors, staffing firms, recruiters, external development shops, agencies and other service partners. monday.com’s partner program also includes authorized partners that sell licenses, implement services, deliver professional services and build apps on top of the platform. If the definition of joint employment shifts, those relationships may draw more scrutiny over who sets schedules, approves time, directs work and controls day-to-day tasks.

That is not just a legal footnote. It affects how HR, finance, procurement and operations write contracts, define reporting lines and document authority. If a contractor is working inside a product team, or an agency is embedded in a sales rollout, the details of supervision can matter as much as the work itself. Clean scopes of work, clear handoffs and records showing who makes decisions can reduce confusion if regulators later ask who really controlled the labor.

The department said its existing Family and Medical Leave Act and Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act regulations use joint-employment standards that differ from each other and from the Fair Labor Standards Act. The Fair Labor Standards Act sets minimum wage, overtime, recordkeeping and child labor standards. The Family and Medical Leave Act gives eligible employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid, job-protected leave a year and requires group health benefits to continue during leave.

The agency said it had not provided regulatory guidance on joint-employer status since 2021. That long gap has left employers with uneven expectations and worker advocates arguing over whether control should be measured narrowly, through direct supervision, or more broadly, through indirect and reserved control. For monday.com, where teams rely on outside help to move quickly, the safest response is to tighten the basics now: document who directs the work, who signs off on time, and where contractor independence really begins and ends.