New Jersey is slamming taxpayers with a one-two punch: forcing them to pay more for their roads — and trampling on the Constitution to do it.
When Evesham Township in southern New Jersey needed some roads repaved in 2025, it put the job out for bid.
Of the eight responding contractors, Earle Asphalt Co.’s bid came in lowest, at $1,463,513.
That’s where the story should have ended: Earle gets the job, taxpayers get their roads fixed at the best price, everyone goes home happy.
It’s not what happened.
Seven days after bids closed, the Evesham Township Council passed a resolution mandating that all public works contracts include a project labor agreement.
That’s a pre-hire collective bargaining arrangement requiring contractors to hire through union halls, and to recognize unions as their workers’ exclusive bargaining representative.
Earle, which has operated as a non-union “open shop” since its founding in 1968, couldn’t agree to those terms without betraying the principles that make it one of New Jersey’s most respected construction companies.
So the township threw out all the bids and started over.
When the dust settled, every offer came in higher than Earle’s original price.
The lowest was $1,617,411 — more than $153,000 above Earle’s bid.
Evesham taxpayers are now on the hook for that amount to get the exact same roads repaved by a different company willing to abide by the unionization requirement.
The roads don’t know the difference. The taxpayers’ wallets do.
It’s a small-scale preview of what’s happening all across New Jersey, as project labor agreements spread from large state projects down to routine local work.
In January, outgoing Gov. Phil Murphy signed legislation eliminating the cost-threshold rules that once limited PLAs to major endeavors, allowing municipalities to slap union mandates on virtually any public works contract.
The result is predictable: fewer bidders, less competition, higher prices.
The company has now taken the state to federal court, represented by Pacific Legal Foundation and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty.
It’s challenging the PLA mandate as well as an equally troubling state policy requiring contractors on public projects to meet “targeted employment goals” — in plain English, race- and sex-based hiring quotas.
Fail to hit your numbers, and the state can fine you, penalize you and jeopardize your future public contracts.
Earle has spent nearly six decades hiring and assigning workers based on merit, skill and need.
The company doesn’t discriminate, period — but under New Jersey’s scheme, that’s not enough.
Trenton is forcing Earle to track the race and sex of his workforce and hit county-by-county demographic targets.
If the numbers in its required monthly compliance reports don’t add up, Earle must either cut a deal with a union to supply the right workers or complete 25-part bureaucratic obstacle course — an onerous ordeal that exists solely to pressure non-union shops into joining the union fold.
The US Constitution has something to say about all this.
The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause doesn’t allow the government to force private employers to sort workers by race and sex.
To survive legal scrutiny, racial classifications must serve a compelling governmental interest and be narrowly tailored to achieve it.
New Jersey’s rule doesn’t come close: It’s a blatant racial quota with no justification and no sunset — precisely what the Constitution forbids.
Meanwhile, the PLA mandate raises a different constitutional problem.
The First Amendment protects not just the right to speak, but the right to freely associate — and, critically, the right not to associate.
Forcing Earle to recognize and funnel money to unions as a condition of competing for public contracts compels association and subsidizes speech that Earle and its employees never agreed to.
These discriminatory rules are doing demonstrable harm.
Earle’s senior employees have an average tenure of 18 years, remarkable in an industry defined by turnover.
The company is nationally recognized for second-chance hiring, giving people with criminal records a genuine shot at a career.
“This isn’t about me,” co-owner Michael Earle says. “This is about our people.”
If his employees choose a union, that’s their right.
But the government doesn’t get to make that choice for them.
That’s what Earle is fighting for in federal court: not special treatment — just the right to compete on merit, hire on merit, and keep its workers free to make their own choices.
New Jersey has spent decades substituting government mandates for both market competition and individual freedom.
The bill for that overreach is now showing up on taxpayers’ invoices — $153,000 at a time, in Evesham and across the state.
Erin Wilcox, a senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation, is representing Earle Asphalt in federal court.
