Unfair labor laws are cheating farmworkers, lawsuit claims

The plaintiffs want farmworkers to receive the same minimum wage and overtime requirements that most other workers get. (Courtesy of the New Jersey Department of Agriculture)

At age 14, Edgar Aquino-Huerta began working on the farms of New Jersey, picking produce and carrying heavy crates to help his family earn a living. But it wasn’t until he left the fields for community college and started working in a factory that he learned about overtime pay.

He discovered that after 40 hours at his job stacking boxes of avocados, he’d be paid nearly $12, up from his roughly $8 hourly wage at the time.

“I started asking my family members who also worked in agriculture, ‘Do you guys get paid overtime?’ and they don’t. Then I was like, ‘You guys work over 12 hours a day in the fields. This isn’t making any sense that you don’t qualify for overtime,’” said Aquino-Huerta.

Aquino-Huerta is a member of El Comité de Apoyo a los Trabajadores Agrícolas, or CATA, a South Jersey-based nonprofit organization supporting agricultural workers in the Garden State.

The group filed a complaint in state Superior Court in Mercer County last week accusing the state of discriminating against farmworkers by excluding them from the same provisions as most other workers covered by the state’s Wage and Hour Law. CATA is seeking a permanent injunction to prevent the state from enforcing what they say are discriminatory exclusions.

“It would just mean that farmworkers would be treated just like every other worker that’s entitled to the overtime and minimum wage provisions of New Jersey law,” said Jenny-Brooke Condon, a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School who directs the school’s Equal Justice Clinic.

The Seton Hall Law School Center for Social Justice, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, and the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project filed the complaint, naming state Attorney General Matthew Platkin, state Labor Commissioner Rob Asaro-Angelo, and state Secretary of Agriculture Edward Wengryn as defendants.

In 2019, Gov. Phil Murphy signed a law that raised the minimum wage in phases over five years until it reached $15 per hour. Currently, the state’s minimum wage is $15.13 an hour for most workers. But the law carves out farmworkers, who earn $12.81 an hour, from the same increases.

They won’t reach $15 an hour until Jan. 1, 2027, three years later than the rest of the state. The slower approach to $15 an hour also applies to some seasonal employers and businesses with fewer than six employees.

The minimum wage rises annually because of a constitutional amendment voters approved in 2013. That means the wage floor for agricultural workers and most other workers won’t converge until 2030, Condon said, making farmworkers’ wage increases unfairly come “lower and slower” than the rest of the state.

The complaint claims that by denying farmworkers equal pay and overtime violates farmworkers’ right to safety under the New Jersey Constitution, and the current wage laws extend “favoritism and immunity from fair labor obligations to the farm industry at the expense of vulnerable workers.” These violations also run afoul of the New Jersey Civil Rights Act, the complaint says.

Farmers and agricultural lobbyists have fought against mandated minimum wage increases across the country, arguing that they would be too expensive for small farms with thin profit margins.

Roughly 25,000 farm laborers work in New Jersey. It’s a strenuous job that’s done in all kinds of weather, from pouring rain to 100-degree heat. They spend their days bent over picking food and carrying heavy loads, most of the time with few breaks or access to shade, CATA members say in the complaint.

These workers often don’t speak English and can’t vote in New Jersey due to their immigration status or because they don’t live in New Jersey year-round.  Because of that, they’re effectively politically muted, said Condon.

This is the reason they’re taking the issue to the courts instead of seeking a legislative fix, she said.

The New Jersey Supreme Court has recognized farmworkers warrant special judicial protections because they’re among the state’s most marginalized residents. They are economically disadvantaged, live in rural areas far from legal resources or community organizations, don’t speak English, and lack union representation, the complaint states.

“That’s a sort of core and fundamental principle of equal protection that we can’t just leave to the legislative process when people are historically and consistently being discriminated against in the laws, which is the case for farmworkers, who have little political power to overturn that discriminatory treatment through the legislative process,” Condon said.

Manuel Guzman, lead organizer at CATA, said providing farmworkers with overtime pay and minimum wage requirements that most other workers receive would be life-changing. Food, rent, and transportation prices have surged in the last few years, and since farmworkers earn an average of $25,000 to $29,999 nationwide annually, any extra money would alleviate their financial burden, he said.

“Families who are dealing with health problems, with children who need school, to have the basics of food — as one says, bread from heaven,” he said in an interview translated from Spanish.

A change could also allow some workers to stay in New Jersey beyond the short farming season, Guzman added. Some agricultural workers live in houses near the farms, which are often cinder block housing filled with bunk beds or cots and shared bathrooms, rarely with air conditioning, the complaint says.

“Who wants to live in a house like that? But they have no other choice because they’re not even getting paid that much,” Aquino-Huerta said. “So if farmworkers were included, you would actually be able to afford rent.”

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