Bruce Miller worked at a Sears Auto Center in Toms River for more than 35 years before losing his job last April as the once-iconic retailer shuttered storefronts on its descent toward bankruptcy.

Miller, 56, got eight weeks’ severance, but it wasn’t enough. Within weeks, he lost his house and saw his medical insurance lapse, and he is now struggling to find stable work.

Now New Jersey lawmakers want to give Miller and employees like him a legally guaranteed severance package of at least one week's pay for every year worked.

“What happened to me is not exception but the rule of how retail works these days,” Miller said. “Right now, the laws of this country favor the Eddie Lamperts of the world,” he added, referring to Sears’s current chairman and former chief executive. “These billionaires are not accountable for working people like me, and that needs to change.”

Miller was in Trenton on Thursday as a Senate committee approved first-of-its-kind legislation to provide that severance pay at any company that lays off 50 or more employees.

The measure, prompted by massive layoffs at places like Sears and Toys R Us in recent months, would also require companies with 100 or more employees to give at least 90 days’ notice of such layoffs — up from the current minimum of 60 days — and mandate an extra four weeks of severance if that notice requirement is not met.

Current law in New Jersey requires employers to provide workers a week of severance pay for every year of service only if the company fails to provide the 60-day notice of termination.

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Also new under the bill, employers would have to provide 15 days' notice in advance of a bankruptcy filing or any change of control, and they would not be able to terminate workers for at least 180 days thereafter.

“In the event of corporate losses and bankruptcy, the first people to think of, the first people to protect, must be the employees,” Sen. Nellie Pou, D-Passaic, a bill sponsor, said Thursday.

The bill, S-3170, was passed by the Senate Commerce Committee in a 3-2 vote, prompting an outcry from New Jersey’s business community.

Businesses in New Jersey already feel beset-upon after Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, have worked together to enact a higher corporate business tax, new sick leave requirements and a $15 minimum wage. All those policies will increase the cost of doing business in New Jersey, business groups say, and the new severance requirements would add to the burden.

“This legislation is going to deter companies from even considering locating in New Jersey,” Michael Wallace, vice president of government affairs at the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, said in a statement. “If enacted, this proposal would make our business climate even less competitive.”

To become law, the measure must still be approved by an Assembly committee, pass in the full Senate and Assembly and be signed Murphy.

Jack Raisner, an attorney and law professor at St. John’s University who helped craft the measure, said New Jersey would be the first state to enact a one-week-per-year-of-service severance requirement for mass layoffs, while other provisions in the bill have already been adopted by other states.

The provision regarding notice requirements and layoff restrictions in the event of a bankruptcy, for example, is modeled after a law in California that took effect last month and may be enforced in the bankruptcy filing of the California utility PG&E, Raisner said.

“The reason for this provision is it hits a pause button on the plans of the financiers who are arranging these changes of control in bankruptcies in order to dump their debt and dump their employees,” he said, adding that there’s an “off ramp” in the bill allowing the state to override the 180-day layoff restriction if needed.

More than 11,000 workers at 55 companies in New Jersey received notices in 2018 that their jobs were in jeopardy, the bill sponsors said.

Email: pugliese@northjersey.com