State enforcement is what failed here. That failure is what created the lawsuit.
Building and General Construction Laborers Local 3 and the Laborers’ Eastern Region Organizing Fund filed suit in Hudson County Superior Court on August 11, announcing it the next day at a Jersey City press conference. The defendants are general contractor A.J.D. Construction Co. of Leonardo, New Jersey and concrete subcontractor Concrete Rising LLC of Jersey City. It is, to the plaintiffs’ knowledge, the first union-initiated case under New Jersey’s up-the-chain liability statute.
The chain
AJD was general contractor on One Journal Square, a roughly 2-million-sq-ft development, and 35 Cottage Street, 27 stories. AJD hired Concrete Rising. Concrete Rising hired GP Concrete Construction LLC, a labor broker that served as employer of record for about 240 workers.
GP Concrete stopped paying around August 12, 2024. According to the complaint, workers were told to keep going on assurances of payment and worked through October 2024 unpaid, at promised rates of $18 to $35 an hour plus overtime, regularly above 40 hours.
The New Jersey Department of Labor found at least 240 employees unpaid for that August-through-October window, owing at least $716,000 in wages. At least 70 workers filed complaints. GP Concrete filed Chapter 7 in February 2026, listing the workers as nonpriority creditors and walking away from NJDOL negotiations.
Then the department settled for a third
The complaint alleges NJDOL settled with Concrete Rising in June 2026 for $250,000, roughly 35 cents on the dollar against the state’s own estimate, payable on a nine-month schedule beginning September 15, 2026. As of filing, the workers had received nothing. The complaint also alleges Concrete Rising had settled with NJDOL in March 2024 over a different subcontractor’s failure to pay wages, months before the Journal Square non-payment started.
Any general contractor treating a labor-department settlement as its exposure ceiling should notice what just happened to the ceiling. The union is seeking unpaid wages plus an additional 200% in liquidated damages, from parties that never employed these workers.
The broker layer stopped being a firewall
General contractor to trade subcontractor to broker-as-employer-of-record is completely ordinary on Northeast concrete packages. The complaint’s theory is that the broker’s insolvency is the trigger for up-the-chain recovery rather than a defense against it.
The statutory hook is New Jersey’s contractor liability provision, which reaches subcontractor wage debts at any tier, plus joint-and-several liability under the state’s wage laws. The Wage Collection Law was amended in early 2024 to let unions sue on behalf of members and non-members who consent in writing. That amendment had sat largely unused until now.
If this survives a motion to dismiss, prequalifying second- and third-tier subcontractors stops being paperwork and starts being underwriting. New York’s analogous provision and its cousins in other states have generated almost no union-initiated case law. The answer gets written in Hudson County.
These are unproven allegations. No response from AJD or Concrete Rising had been located as of publication. The $2 million figure circulating is the union’s characterization; the complaint pleads $716,000 plus 200%. The developers on both projects are not defendants.