Attorney Erin Wilcox of Pacific Legal Foundation, one of two law firms representing Earle Asphalt at no cost, says the case aims to end unconstitutional hiring mandates and restore equal access to public contracting.
She tells AFN two laws are making it really tough for the company to operate.
"The first … says that the state of New Jersey gets to tell Earle how many women and how many minorities it can hire for every state project," Wilcox reports.
Earle wants to assign employees to projects based on who is best for the job and how many of a specific trade they need for each project, but the state is essentially telling Earle it has to discriminate when it hires employees.
The second challenge is to a statute that forces Earle, an "open shop" that has never been associated with a union, to agree to project labor agreements requiring anyone who wins a contract to work with a specific union or group of unions.
"If Earle wants to win any of these big construction projects that keep it in business, they're being told they have to agree to sign on with the union, let the union step in and negotiate with its employees, and its employees have to pay into union benefit funds," Wilcox explains.
She says the 2023 decisions in the Harvard and the University of North Carolina affirmative action cases, in which the Supreme Court said only a few circumstances allow the government to treat people differently because of race, should work in Earle's favor.
In this case, Wilcox says the state of New Jersey has not proven any of those specific needs to have a law that tells Earle it must hire people based on race.
In another case, Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the U.S. Supreme Court said people cannot be forced to belong to unions and pay dues to unions because that is forcing them to speak and associate, which is a violation of First Amendment rights.
"We think that these project labor agreements are forcing Earle and its employees to speak to a union and associate with a union that they don't want to," Wilcox tells AFN.
The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, but Wilcox believes everyone should pay attention to it regardless of where they live because project labor agreements are forcing states to hire union labor instead of the lowest bidder for jobs, which raises prices for everybody.
In this case, the city took the project, pulled it back, sent it back out for a bid again, but this time only with a project labor agreement attached to it; the lowest bidder the second time around was almost $200,000 more expensive.
Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) is also involved in this case on behalf of Earle Asphalt.
