Law360, New York (August 11, 2014, 3:37 PM ET) — New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie on Friday again vetoed two bills designed to promote pay equality for employees of state contractors and prolong the statute of limitations for unfair wage claims, after shooting them both down in 2012.
Christie conditionally vetoed the Unfair Wage Recovery Act, pending modifications, which would have restarted the statute of limitations governing pay discrimination claims with each paycheck an employee receives by declaring each paycheck an individual instance of the violation. He absolutely vetoed the Wage Transparency Act, which would have compelled state contractors to compile and submit details about gender, race, job description and wage information for all their employees as a condition of the state contract.
Christie said the bills, which were passed by the New Jersey Senate in March, were part of a “patchwork of proposals” to address workplace discrimination, many of which he approved, according to the veto messages for the bills. But the transparency bill wouldn’t do much to improve anti-discrimination laws or boost workplace equality, Christie said.
“As I explained when I vetoed this proposal last session, expanding the existing rigorous reporting requirements of the Prevailing Wage Act would simply impose costly and burdensome mandates upon our state’s businesses, and would do nothing to tangibly advance the bill’s purported goals,” according to Christie’s veto message for Senate Bill No. 1038.
Wage-reporting requirements are already in place in New Jersey for contractors who are subject to the Prevailing Wage Act, but 1038 would’ve added requirements for gender and race information for employees, and would also require contractors not subject to prevailing wage laws to submit the information.
Christie endorsed the general purpose of the unfair wage bill, Senate Bill 783, saying it would bring New Jersey state law into alignment with the federal protections offered by the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009.
But Christie, in his veto message, recommended amending the bill with language that would limit the amount of back pay an employee could collect to a two-year period, regardless of how long the pay disparity lasted, in keeping with the federal legislation.
Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, primary sponsor of the bills, slammed the governor’s vetoes in a statement on Friday.
“The ‘conditions’ of his conditional veto of the ‘Unfair Wage Recovery Act’ are not acceptable and his veto of the Wage Transparency Act is just plain indefensible,” Weinberg said. “Democrats will continue our efforts to bring equality into the workplace and to protect women against unfair treatment by employers. We will continue to fight pay discrimination until women are provided the just and equal wages they deserve.”
In March, the Senate passed the Unfair Wage Recovery Act 21-13 and the Wage Transparency Act by a 22-15 margin. Christie had previously vetoed both bills in September 2012, recommending a similar change to the language of the unfair wage bill, before they were reintroduced in May 2013.
That month, the Senate Majority Office cited a 2013 Institute for Women’s Policy Research study of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data that documents the pay gap for women and minorities, showing that the gender pay gap closed by more than 10 percent from 1981 to 1990 and by 4 percent from 1991 to 2000, when the progress stalled and failed to pick back up.
The office said that women have been denied the right to be compensated for unequal pay because their legal claims were cut off by the statute of limitations even though they were unaware of the discriminatory pay.
“The governor still doesn’t realize the fact that women are unjustly, disadvantagedly paid,” Assemblywoman Pamela R. Lampitt, D-Burlington, who helped revive the gender parity bills, told Law360 on Monday. “Across the spectrum, from medical to law to all aspects of quality of life.”
Lampitt said she would persist with the proposed legislation, noting that having access to information under the transparency bill could potentially provide labor attorneys evidence of discrimination.
In August 2013, Christie signed a bill into law that expressly bars employers from retaliating against workers who ask colleagues about their job title, occupational category or pay under legislation intended to battle wage discrimination.
—Additional reporting by Kelly Knaub and Joshua Alston. Editing by Kelly Duncan.