By Savannah Daly
In early September, the NFA’s Government Relations Committee (GRC) began a campaign to encourage franchisees to meet with their congressional representatives during the October legislative recess.
NFA Vice President of Legislative Affairs Misty Chally helped coordinate several meetings across the U.S. to provide NFA members with opportunities to meet with their local congressmen in their BURGER KING® restaurant and share their concerns about pressing legislative issues.
Franchisee Patrick Sidhu of Premier Kings and his team hosted U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter (R-GA-01) in one of the company’s Savannah, Georgia, BURGER KING restaurants. Congressman Bill Johnson (R-OH-06) visited franchisee Matt Herridge and his team at a restaurant in Belpre, Ohio, and franchisee Bruce Pavlikowski hosted District Director Keith Brekhus from the office of Rep. Tom O’Halleran (D-AZ-01) in one of his locations.
Because Congress had to return to Washington, D.C., for an unexpected budget vote during the week of Oct. 10, several of the planned meetings were postponed to later this fall. The NFA encourages its members to maintain relationships with their local representatives to ensure their voices are heard on Capitol Hill.
During the meetings, the legislators visited with restaurant team members and discussed labor, tax and transportation issues with franchisees. The NFA’s current legislative priorities are as follows:
Labor: The NFA supports legislation that encourages individuals to return to work so that small businesses can operate at full capacity, as well as bills that provide needed recovery dollars for the restaurant industry. The NFA opposes the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, which implements several highly contentious policies that would shift employers’ focus from creating job opportunities to defending employment policies, and the Raise the Wage Act, instead asking for a more moderate incremental proposal to raise the federal minimum wage that accounts for cost-of-living disparities across the country.
Taxes: The NFA supports the Main Street Tax Certainty Act to make permanent the Section 199A 20% deduction for qualified business income and the Death Tax Repeal Act to eliminate burdensome compliance and monetary costs on family-run businesses.
Transportation: The NFA supports the Drive Safe Act, which creates an apprenticeship program for truck drivers over the age 18 to allow them to drive across state lines to alleviate the nation’s truck driver shortage. Currently law requires drivers to be 21 to drive in interstate commerce. The NFA also supports the current commercialization ban on prohibiting state departments of transportation to compete against the private sector by selling food and fuel at interstate rest areas.
While the DC to BK promotion was focused on October recess, feel free to reach out to NFA’s Government Relations Department any time to schedule an in-district meeting.
