| NJBIA President and CEO Michele Siekerka issued the following statement regarding a bill signed into law today by Gov. Phil Murphy that mandates worker retention after a change of ownership – or even after a minor service contract vendor change – effectively removing an employer’s right to make their own operational decisions.
Bill S-2389 (Singleton, Zwicker)/A-4682 (Schaer, Timberlake, Danielsen) requires a vast range of full- and part-time service employees to be retained for 60 days whenever a business changes ownership of service contracts.
“This law unfortunately imposes the most far-reaching iteration of employee retention mandates to date in New Jersey and unfortunately could result in significant health and safety implications for our residents, employees and employers.”
“To put the situational impacts in layman’s terms, if Company A contracts with ABC Cleaning Service to clean their facility and ends that contract to hire XYZ Cleaning Service instead, the XYZ Cleaning Service will be mandated to assume ABC Cleaning Service’s employees for 60 days.
“As evident by this example, successor employers will be mandated to hire another vendor’s employees regardless of whether the original vendor had other work assignments for those employees, if the successor employer had their own employees to bring on to the job whose employment status may now be at risk, or if the covered location contracting for service work was dissatisfied with the job being done by the previous vendor’s employees.
“This new law will make it impractical and overly burdensome for an employer to change service contracts, stifling competition, efficiency as well as consumer health and safety.
“We believe our businesses deserve the freedom to make operational decisions for the betterment, and sometimes survival, of their business. This law effectively takes that right away. Our businesses deserve better than lawmakers dictating how they choose to run their operations.” |
