On May 2, 2016, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, for the second time, issued a conditional veto of proposed legislation that would bar gender-based pay discrimination, saying in part that the Bill would go too far beyond federal standards and make New Jersey “very business unfriendly.”

In an effort to address and remediate gender-pay gaps in the state, the New Jersey Senate introduced and passed Senate Bill No. 992 (the “Bill”) in February 2016. The Bill comprised similar terms presented in two separate Senate bills back in 2012, one of which Gov. Christie issued a conditional veto of in March 2012, explaining at the time that his opposition sprang from the bill’s failure to include an explicit statutory limitation on back-pay recoveries for employees. Other provisions of the current Bill that would have required government contractors to report employee gender and compensation information to the New Jersey Department of Labor were also vetoed by Gov. Christie in 2012, who commented back then that the unique gender and pay-data reporting requirements would impose costly burdens on the state’s employers.
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