Jersey City firefighters sue for years of overtime after a state wage-law gap

JERSEY CITY — Two Jersey City fire officers say the city has been paying them under the wrong overtime clock since 2019.Battalion Chief Peter Nowak and Captain Jason Howe filed a class-action complaint in Hudson County Superior Court on August 27, 2026. They named the City of Jersey City, the Fire Department, and the Department of Public Safety. The claim is that firefighters did not get time-and-a-half after 40 hours in a workweek, from June 25, 2019, to now. They asked for unpaid wages, other damages, and a jury trial. The complaint does not list a total amount or say how many firefighters would join the class.The hours at issue are not mystery shifts. They are the department’s ordinary rotation.Most paid fire departments in New Jersey work 24 hours on and 72 hours off. Two tours in one week are 48 hours. The next week may be 24. Federal law treats that pattern as a public-safety schedule, not as a stack of office overtime. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act’s Section 207(k) rule, firefighters on a 28-day cycle generally do not trigger required overtime until they pass 212 hours. Sworn law-enforcement employees have a 171-hour mark in the same window. njlm.org

New Jersey’s Wage and Hour Law uses a flatter rule: overtime after 40 hours in a seven-day week. When lawmakers rewrote that statute in 2019 to raise the minimum wage, they did not copy the federal fire-and-police exemption into state law. The state claim also runs back six years. That is the opening plaintiffs have used. njlm.org

The New Jersey League of Municipalities put the problem in one sentence. Leaving 207(k) out of the state statute, it said, let lawyers argue that public-safety employees “must be paid overtime at a premium rate after working 40 hours in any workweek, just for working their negotiated regular schedules.” Cities answer that those schedules were bargained and are the job, not unpaid extra time. northjersey.com

The same theory is already in other counties. In Atlantic City, firefighters Joseph Caprio, Vincent Carleo, William Dilorenzo, Anthony Santoro, and John Varallo sued under the Wage and Hour Law and asked the court to order “retroactive overtime wages due, as well as liquidated damages,” plus a declaration that the pay practice violates the statute. In Paterson, firefighters Adrian Evans and Kenneth Hicks got a class certified in a wage-and-hour case; the Appellate Division left that order in place on May 26, 2026. The League has also pointed to filings against Summit and other paid departments. It has warned that six years of this reading, applied statewide, “reaches into the billions.” That number is the League’s estimate, not a judgment. law360.com

Jersey City would have to pay any award from books that are already strained. The city’s independent audit of 2025 finances, released August 14, 2026, sampled 20 overtime payments and found “one payment covered ten hours against records supporting six,” while seven samples included “no description of the work performed.” The same audit flagged a $32,240 severance overpayment from a data-entry error. City finance reports put public-safety salaries at the top of the payroll and describe overtime cuts as part of closing a large inherited deficit. A multi-year overtime judgment would not hit an empty calendar. It would hit a budget that is already carrying old bills. jerseycitynj.gov

Trenton is trying to change the statute before more verdicts land. Senate Bill 4443 and Assembly Bill 5276 would write the federal thresholds into New Jersey law for fire protection and sworn law enforcement: 212 hours in 28 days for fire work, 171 hours for sworn law enforcement, with a scaled cutoff for shorter cycles. The drafts apply that rule back to February 4, 2019. The Senate budget committee advanced S-4443 in July. The Assembly Labor Committee reported A-5276 on September 14. Sponsor Assemblyman Chris Tully has said the Assembly bill is likely headed to another committee. Neither bill is law. billtrack50.com

Until one is signed, the 2019 text is what a Hudson County judge has. The Jersey City case is still early. No class has been certified. The city has not put a public defense on the record beyond treating the matter as active litigation.The question is narrow. If a firefighter works a 24-hour tour the contract already counts as a regular shift, does state law still treat every hour past 40 that week as overtime? The complaint says yes. The pending bills say the Legislature never meant that. The court will have to pick one.