Articles Tagged with New Jersey Wage and Hour Attorneys

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The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which hears appeals from federal district courts in New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania and the United States Virgin Islands, recently rejected a challenge to the New Jersey Temporary Workers’ Bill of Rights in the case of New Jersey Staffing Alliance vs. Cari Fais, Acting Director of the New Jersey State Division of Consumersupreme-court-building-1209701__340-300x200 Affairs in the Department of Law and Public Safety.

Background: The New Jersey Temporary Workers Bill of Rights

The New Jersey Temporary Workers’ Bill of Rights was passed by the New Jersey Legislature in 2023.  It was designed to protect temporary workers employed in New Jersey.  It enacted several measures to meet this goal.  These include disclosure requirements and certification procedures.  It also imposes joint and several liability on both staffing firms and the businesses which obtain temporary workers through those staffing firms.

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New Jersey employment law affords significant wage and hour protections to employees through the New Jersey Wage and Hour Law and the New Jersey Wage Payment Law.  Both laws were significantly strengthened by amendments in 2019, adding additional penalties,6-300x225 recovery of attorneys fees, enhanced damages, and a longer, six-year statute of limitations.  One question left open by the Legislature was whether the statute of limitations would be applied retroactively to cover conduct prior to the amendments, or prospectively to cover only conduct from 2019 onward.  The New Jersey Supreme Court has now unambiguously answered that question.

The New Jersey Wage Payment Law

The New Jersey Wage Payment Law was enacted in 1965 and governs the timing and payment of wages.  It prohibits withholdings of wages unless the law expressly allows or requires.  Wages must be paid at least twice per month, and no later than 10 days after the pay period covered.  The employee must be told in advance what she will be earning, and before any changes to her pay are made.  She must be paid all wages due when she leaves employment on the next regular payday.

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The Wage and Hour Division of the United States Department of Labor has issued a new regulation vastly increasing the number of employees who are entitled to overtime.

Background

Both Federal and New Jersey employment law both require that employees must be paid one and a half times their regular hourly rate (“timecourthouse-1223280__340-300x200 and a half”) for work beyond forty hours in any week.  However, there are exceptions.  The major exemptions are for executive, administrative, professional, and highly compensated employees.  In addition to the requirements particular to each exemption, the employees cannot be paid less than the threshold for the exemption.

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New Jersey employment law requires that employees must be paid at regular intervals, at least twice per month.  The proposition that employees should be paid for the time that they work does not seem to be illogical.  However, litigation over non-payment of wages is all toous-supreme-court-300x200 common.  The New Jersey Appellate Division recently addressed one of the laws behind this issue in the case of Veronica Villalobos v. Beast Coast Moving Limited Liability Company.

Background

Veronica Vilalobos and Joe Esquijarosa brought suit against their employer, Beast Coast Moving Limited Liability Company, for violation of the New Jersey Wage Payment Law, in the Law Division of the Superior Court of New Jersey, sitting in Bergen County.

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The New Jersey Wage and Hour Law and Wage Payment Law

Like the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act, New Jersey’s Wage and Hour Law requires that employers pay non-exempt employees minimum wage for all hours that they work, and overtime (time and a half) when employees work more than forty hours per week.  New Jersey’s Wage Payment Law requires that employers pay employees pay allemployment_law_damages wages that they are due, and sets forth the timing and procedures for payments and permitted deductions.  This is a much-litigated area of New Jersey employment law.

Suits under the New Jersey Wage and Hour Law and Wage Payment Law have long been required to be brought within two years of the violations or they would be time barred.  However, in 2019 the New Jersey Legislature amended both laws to extend the time for filing a civil lawsuit for violation of the laws from two to six years.  The amendments were silent about whether they would apply retroactively or only going forward.  Generally, unless the Legislature provides for retroactive application of new statutes of limitations they apply only prospectively – in other words they normally apply only going forward to acts which occurred after the amendment, not looking backward to what happened before.  These amendments were to take effect immediately upon enactment, which occurred on August 6, 2019.

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The Increase

New Jersey’s minimum wage rate is going up again.  The new minimum wage rate during this incremental increase is $13 per hour effective January 1, 2022.stock-photo-20612112-woman-leading-business-team

Background

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New Jersey employment law governs the classification of workers as employees or independent contractors.  The classification is important and fact sensitive.  It has far reaching consequences.  The Appellate Division recently issued a published opinion in imagesCAWQ89PSthe case of East Bay Drywall, LLC vs. the Department of Labor and Workforce Development, which examined some of these issues and provides guidance for both employers and employees.

Background

The Department of Labor and Workforce Development administers the New Jersey Unemployment Compensation and Temporary Disability Insurance Laws. It collects revenues from employers and employees to fund these benefits.  However, “employers” only need to make contributions for their “employees,” not for independent contractors.  Therefore, there is an economic incentive for businesses to classify workers as contractors rather than employees.  However, misclassification can trigger severe consequences.

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The New Jersey Wage and Hour Law regulates minimum wage and overtime requirements.  It is New Jersey’s counterpart to the Federal Fair Labor Standards Act.  The Wage and Hour Law and Fair Labor Standards Act are bedrock elements of New Jersey employment law.  Under the Wage and Hour Law, New Jersey employers must pay overtime at a rate of one and half times an employee’s regular pay if she works more than forty hours a week.  However, if the employer is in imagesCAWQ89PSthe trucking industry, the employer is only legally required to pay overtime at the rate of one and half times minimum wage.  However, if the employer should have paid the higher rate but paid the lower rate, it can raise the defense that it did so in “good faith” reliance on government orders or regulations.

In the case of Branch v. Cream-O-Land Dairy, Elmer Branch filed a class action lawsuit in the New Jersey Superior Court against his employer, Cream-O-Land Dairy, on behalf of himself and similarly situated truck drivers employees, for non-payment of overtime in violation of the Wage and Hour Law.  Cream-O-Land argued that it was not required to pay the higher rate for two reasons.  First, it argued that it was a “trucking industry employer,” and that all the employees were paid at least the lower overtime rate.  Second, it argued that it met the “good faith” defense.  The trial agreed that Cream-O-Land satisfied the good faith defense and dismissed the case on that ground.  Branch appealed to the Appellate Division of the Superior Court which reversed, finding that the matters on which Cream-O-Land relied did not satisfy the statutory requirements of the Wage and Hour Law.

Cream-O-Land then appealed to the Supreme Court of New Jersey.  Because the trial judge did not address the exemption for trucking industry employers the Supreme Court, like the Appellate Division,  examined only whether Cream-O-Land satisfied the good faith defense.  It ruled that it did not.

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American, Bills, Business, Cheque
In the case of Secretary of United States Department of Labor vs. Bristol Excavating, Inc., the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, recently issued an important, precedential opinion on when payments by third-parties need to be included by employers in the calculation of their employees’ overtime pay rates.

Bristol Excavating, Inc. (Bristol) is a small excavation contractor.  Bristol was a subcontract for Talisman Energy, Inc., a large producer of natural gas.  Bristol provided Talisman with equipment, labor and services at Talisman’s drilling sites.  Bristol’s employees often worked more than 40 hours per week, and Bristol paid them “overtime,” or one and a half times the regular hourly rate which Bristol normally paid them (“time and a half”) for all the hours they worked over 40 hours in one week.

Talisman offered workers at its sites – not just its own employees – separate bonuses rewarding them for safety, efficiency and productively measured by completion of work.  Bristol’s employees asked Bristol if they could participate.  Bristol agreed, and also agreed to do the administrative work.  This administrative work included paying the bonuses through Bristol’s payroll, and taking out all applicable tax withholdings.  Bristol did not include these bonuses in its calculation for overtime pay for its employees because it was not Bristol’s money with which the employees were being paid.

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Refugees, Economic Migrants

Governor Murphy signed New Jersey’s Equal Pay Act into law in 2018.  The NJEPA  takes a necessary step in making pay discrepancies in the workplace more transparent with the hopes that this will address the pay differential between white men minorities, and women.  Essentially, it bars any penalty to any employee for requesting or disclosing information regarding any employee’s job title, rate of compensation, benefits, race, gender, ethnicity, or other protected characteristic when the purpose of the inquiry or disclosure to investigate the possibility of discriminatory treatment.  (While the NJEPA was originally intended to address inequitable pay for women, it was expanded to cover all protected classes of people.)

This allows for employees to obtain information which previously (and even now) is largely safeguarded by employers as “private” in order to determine whether they are being discriminated against based upon a protected classification.   Any employer “policy” which forbids discussing compensation in the workplace could be considered void by the law.

The NJEPA amended New Jersey’s Laws Against Discrimination to enable the use of the protections of that statute. The NJEPA also specifically makes it unlawful to pay employees in protected classes a different rate of compensation when performing substantially similar work considering skill, effort, and responsibilities. Differentials may still exist when based on seniority, merit, education, productivity, experience, and other legitimate business reasons. The Act also allows expands upon the LAD’s typical 2-year statute of limitations by setting forth that limitation period restarts each time the employee receives unequal compensation resulting from a discriminatory decision or practice.  The employee may also recover up to 6 years of back pay as a result of a violation by the employer.  Additionally, the employee may receive treble damages – meaning that they may recover three times the monetary damages awarded as a result of the pay discrepancy.

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