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After delays and intense lobbying, NJ passes bill to protect temp workers
By
Louis C. Hochman
Published Feb 3, 2023
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Virojt Changyencham via Getty Images
By
Louis C. Hochman
Published Feb 3, 2023
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After repeated delays and an intense lobbying battle, the New Jersey State Senate has approved the “Temporary Workers' Bill of Rights,” which advocates say will help close the equity gap between temporary workers and regular employees who do the same jobs.
"This is an invisible workforce that has been left vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment," state Sen. Joe Cryan, the bill’s primary sponsor, said Thursday in a statement. “They have been cheated out of their wages, denied benefits, forced to work in unsafe conditions and charged unjustified fees by employers.”
But opponents including the New Jersey Staffing Alliance say the bill will ultimately cost jobs by putting an unreasonable burden on staffing agencies, which will then pass costs to clients like Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, Walmart and UPS.
Cryan estimated the New Jersey temporary-staffing industry includes at least 127,000 people working for an estimated 100 licensed temp agencies, with an unknown number of people working for unlicensed agencies.
“Many temp workers are people of color or first-generation Americans who are working hard to support themselves and their families,” Cryan said in his statement.
The bill would ban temp agencies from making unitemized paycheck deductions for costs such as meals or transportation to and from work sites, which can lower a worker’s pay below minimum wage. It would also require agencies to tell workers where they’ll be assigned and how much they’ll be paid. And it would mandate that temp agencies pay workers the same as permanent employees at a work site and provide them with equivalent benefits — a particular sticking point for staffing agencies.
A worker taken to a job site but sent home without work would still get four hours’ pay, under the bill.
The measure now heads to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk. He’s expected to sign it, as it was prompted by and caters to his conditional veto of an earlier version.
It’s been a long road for supporters of the bill. A version of the measure passed both chambers of the Legislature in June, but due to a clerical error, the Senate voted on an iteration of the measure that didn’t match the version in the Assembly. Then, after the two chambers voted another version through, Murphy sent it back, saying he wanted funding and better enforcement mechanisms built in.
That version saw repeated delays, amid stepped-up lobbying from staffing agencies. In a recording of a call obtained by Gothamist, members of the New Jersey Staffing Alliance were heard last year encouraging agencies to give their employees time to call lawmakers and oppose the bill. Roy James, CEO of On Target Staffing, said on the call that the bill would increase costs for third-party clients by 35%, and said four of his clients said they would relocate to Pennsylvania if the bill passed.
The state Senate delayed voting on that version several times — waiting on a session where enough supportive members would be in attendance to guarantee passage, after a pair of Democrats withdrew their support in the fall.
The New Jersey Staffing Alliance said recently on Facebook the repeated delays for the bill prove “that there are still significant flaws in the legislation,” and that a new version should be negotiated. It urged looking to other states for models of legislation that could protect temporary workers from exploitation without overburdening agencies.
Immigrant rights group Make the Road New Jersey said in a statement Thursday the bill will “provide the strongest protections in the country to temp workers in New Jersey's booming warehouse and logistics industry.”
Tagged
economy
new jersey
Politics
Workforce
Louis C. Hochman
After about two decades in (mostly) New Jersey-focused commercial print, digital and digital-but-radio-adjacent news, Lou stumbled into member-supported news in early 2021, as the editor and CEO of Montclair Local. There, he (hopes he) expanded enterprise, brought more sophistication to digital storytelling and moved the nonprofit newsroom closer to long-term financial sustainability. He helped lead the Local to its fourth consecutive General Excellence award from the New Jersey Press Association — the NJPA's highest honor with judges noting the paper's work to strip away layers of government opacity, to hold power to account, to make news accessible for more members of the community, to share the stories and concerns of more facets of the community and to tell compelling stories across multiple media. He's excited to continue the same ethic — news as a public service — at NYPR as the New Jersey and suburbs editor, drawing on the extraordinary talents of reporters including Karen Yi and Nancy Solomon. Lou lives in Philly (that commute!) with his partner and their two cats, about whom and about which he speaks incessantly.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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