Enacts the remedial construction of New York labor law act

• Democratic4

◆ The sponsor's argument

Why Jessica Ramos says this is needed

For many years, New York state and federal courts have recognized that the New York Labor Law, like the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, was intended to achieve broad remedial purposes to benefit workers-and that the Labor Law should accordingly be interpreted in line with those purposes. The Legislature's broad remedial purposes in enacting the Labor Law include securing workers' wage floors, ensuring workers' rights to recover all earned wages and all concomitant liquidated damages and other remedies, protecting workers from retaliation, secur- ing equal pay for equal work, and defraying the harms of unemployment. In recent years, however, federal courts have been moving away from such broad remedial construction of the federal Fair Labor Standards Act, and toward more restrictive, anti-worker readings. See, e.g., Encino Motor- cars, LLC v. Navarro, 138 S. Ct. 1134, 1142-43 (2018)(exemptions to the Fair Labor Standards Act must be given only a "fair reading" and not a "narrow reading" that benefits workers); E.M.D. Sales, Inc. v. Carrera, No. 23-217, 604 U.S. (2025), slip op. at 7-8 (finding employers need only meet preponderance standard of proof in showing an employee is exempt from minimum wage and overtime provisions of the FLSA, and stating in dicta that "the public interest in Fair Labor Standards Act cases does not fall entirely on the side of employees"). In doing so, courts are damaging longstanding precedents recognizing that the FLSA must be read in accordance with its remedial purpose. See, e.g., Greathouse v. JHS Sec. Inc., 784 F.3d 105, 113-14 (2d Cir. 2015) (noting that the Second Circuit has "repeatedly affirmed that the remedial nature of the FLSA warrants an expansive interpretation of its provisions so that they will have the widest possible impact in the national economy.").

This is the sponsor's own case for the bill, quoted from their memorandum. It is not Agora's description of what the bill does.