After repeated delays and an intense lobbying battle, the New Jersey State Senate has authorized the “Temporary Workers’ Bill of Rights,” which advocates say will assist shut the fairness hole between short-term workers and common workers who do the identical jobs.
“This is an invisible workforce that has been left vulnerable to exploitation and mistreatment,” state Sen. Joe Cryan, the bill’s main sponsor, stated Thursday in an announcement. “They have been cheated out of their wages, denied benefits, forced to work in unsafe conditions and charged unjustified fees by employers.”
However opponents together with the New Jersey Staffing Alliance say the bill will in the end value jobs by placing an unreasonable burden on staffing companies, which can then go prices to shoppers like Johnson & Johnson, Amazon, Walmart and UPS.
Cryan estimated the New Jersey temporary-staffing trade contains not less than 127,000 folks working for an estimated 100 licensed temp companies, with an unknown variety of folks working for unlicensed companies.
“Many temp workers are people of color or first-generation Americans who are working hard to support themselves and their families,” Cryan stated in his assertion.
The bill would ban temp companies from making unitemized paycheck deductions for prices akin to meals or transportation to and from work websites, which may decrease a employee’s pay under minimal wage. It could additionally require companies to inform workers the place they’ll be assigned and how a lot they’ll be paid. And it will mandate that temp companies pay workers the identical as everlasting workers at a piece web site and present them with equal advantages — a selected sticking level for staffing companies.
A employee taken to a job web site however despatched house with out work would nonetheless get 4 hours’ pay, below the bill.
The measure now heads to Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk. He’s anticipated to signal it, because it was prompted by and caters to his conditional veto of an earlier model.
It’s been a protracted street for supporters of the bill. A model of the measure handed each chambers of the Legislature in June, however due to a clerical error, the Senate voted on an iteration of the measure that didn’t match the model within the Meeting. Then, after the 2 chambers voted one other model via, Murphy despatched it again, saying he needed funding and higher enforcement mechanisms in-built.
That model noticed repeated delays, amid stepped-up lobbying from staffing companies. In a recording of a name obtained by Gothamist, members of the New Jersey Staffing Alliance have been heard final 12 months encouraging companies to give their workers time to name lawmakers and oppose the bill. Roy James, CEO of On Goal Staffing, stated on the decision that the bill would improve prices for third-party shoppers by 35%, and stated 4 of his shoppers stated they’d relocate to Pennsylvania if the bill handed.
The state Senate delayed voting on that model a number of instances — ready on a session the place sufficient supportive members could be in attendance to assure passage, after a pair of Democrats withdrew their assist within the fall.
The New Jersey Staffing Alliance stated just lately on Fb the repeated delays for the bill show “that there are still significant flaws in the legislation,” and {that a} new model must be negotiated. It urged wanting to different states for fashions of laws that might protect short-term workers from exploitation with out overburdening companies.
Immigrant rights group Make the Street New Jersey stated in an announcement Thursday the bill will “provide the strongest protections in the country to temp workers in New Jersey’s booming warehouse and logistics industry.”