Farmworkers are the backbone of New Jersey’s agricultural industry. Without their labor, the Garden State could not harvest its many crops – the fruits, vegetables, and grains that nourish families across the state.
That’s why in August 2024, we filed a lawsuit to challenge this unjust treatment. On behalf of El Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas (CATA), and with co-counsel from the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project and Seton Hall Law School’s Center for Social Justice, we argue that the exclusions in state wage and hour laws violate farmworkers’ rights under the New Jersey Constitution.
The farmworker exclusions in New Jersey perpetuate economic inequities that have long been baked into federal and state legislation. When the Federal Labor Standards Act (FLSA) was first passed in 1938, lawmakers unambiguously excluded agricultural workers from its benefits because most of these workers were Black. New Jersey’s current wage and hour laws are modeled on the FLSA and maintain similar exceptions, rooted in racism, since their enactment in 1966. And in 2019, when lawmakers elected to raise the statewide minimum wage, they still excluded farmworkers who won’t be guaranteed same statewide minimum wage until 2030.
Due to their lower hourly wage, today’s farmworkers miss out on hundreds of dollars in pay every month that could go toward housing, healthcare, and otherwise supporting their families. What's more, farmworkers remain carved out of New Jersey's overtime protections entirely – a serious injustice given that they often work 10+ hours per day.
Farmworkers deserve to earn the same fair wage New Jersey guarantees to other similarly situated workers, and the state Legislature has the power to make this a reality. Yet the particularly vulnerable circumstances of agricultural workers make it more challenging for them to be heard by lawmakers or to participate in the political process. Language barriers, geographic isolation, long hours of physically taxing labor, and the often-migratory nature of their work make it harder for farmworkers to access civil institutions and organizations that could help them assert their rights. Because the majority of New Jersey’s farmworkers are Hispanic or Latiné, they also face discrimination based on race and ethnicity. Relative to a well-funded lobby on behalf of farm owners, there is little representation on behalf of farmworkers in New Jersey.
In March 2025, our team appeared in New Jersey Superior Court to continue the legal fight against New Jersey's farmworker exclusions and argued against the State’s motion to dismiss the case.
At this stage, the court does not resolve factual disputes; the court need only decide whether we have sufficiently alleged a claim for the case to move forward. Here, we raise several constitutional claims on behalf of farmworkers, including that the exclusions violate New Jersey’s equal protection guarantee and that denying farmworkers fair wages and overtime pay also violates their right to safety under the state Constitution. We hope the court agrees.
We cannot be sure how the court will rule, but we do know this: subjecting farmworkers to lower minimum wages and denying them overtime pay is discriminatory and harmful. Here in the Garden State, farmworkers deserve their day in court, and we continue to fight for them.
