The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, and the Seton Hall Law Center for Social Justice filed a complaint on behalf of El Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA) – a grassroots organization advocating to improve the working and living conditions of farmworkers – seeking injunctive relief and declaratory judgment for violations of equal protection under the New Jersey Constitution.
The complaint asserts that exclusions in the state’s wage and hour laws denying farmworkers equal wages and overtime protection are discriminatory, and that these farmworker exclusions violate the state constitution's prohibition on special laws.
Since 1966, New Jersey has denied farmworkers – the vast majority of whom are Latiné and members of the immigrant community – the same overtime protections guaranteed to other New Jerseyans. Despite increasing the statewide minimum wage in 2019, legislators once again disqualified farmworkers from equivalent protection, setting a lower minimum wage and instituting only incremental wage increases until 2030. Not only do these exclusions harm a particularly vulnerable group, they also mirror exclusions in federal labor laws – including the Fair Labor Standards Act -- that were intentionally designed to perpetuate racial discrimination.
