Gov. Pritzker has signed a law that will substantially amend the Illinois Day and Temporary Worker Services Act. The amendments take effect immediately. These changes grant new rights to temporary workers employed by staffing agencies, including – in many cases – a required pay raise. The Illinois law is similar to the recently enacted New Jersey law known as the Temporary Workers’ Bill of Rights.

If your business uses staffing agency workers in Illinois, here’s what you need to know.

The obligations imposed by the amendments are mainly on staffing agencies, not the companies that use the temporary workers. But for the staffing agencies to comply, they will need to obtain certain information from their clients – the companies using the temporary workers.

Companies using temporary workers in Illinois should expect the following:

1. The staffing agency will require the company to make disclosures about the job title, pay, and benefits of similarly situated and similarly tenured regular employees. That is because the staffing agency is now required to base its pay on the pay and benefits received by similarly situated regular employees. Here’s the relevant text in the new law, explaining the pay requirements:

Sec. 42. Equal pay for equal work. A day or temporary laborer who is assigned to work at a third party client for more than 90 calendar days shall be paid not less than the rate of pay and equivalent benefits as the lowest paid directly hired employee of the third party client with the same level of seniority at the company and performing the same or substantially similar work on jobs the performance of which requires substantially similar skill, effort, and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions.

If there is not a directly hired comparative employee of the third party client, the day or temporary laborer shall be paid not less than the rate of pay and equivalent benefits of the lowest paid direct hired employee of the company with the closest level of seniority at the company.

A day and temporary labor service agency may pay the hourly cash equivalent of the actual cost benefits in lieu of benefits required under this Section.

2. The staffing agency will require that the company not make any temporary workers cross a picket line.

3. The staffing agency will require that the company make disclosures about safety and health practices and hazards at the worksite. The obligation to provide safety training is on the agency, not the company, but the company will be obligated to provide the agency with information necessary for the agency to conduct the training.

4. The staffing agency will be required to submit a summary of its safety training to the company; will be required to provide temps with contact information for the Illinois Department of Labor hotline where they can make health and safety complaints; and will be required to inform each worker to whom they should report health and safety concerns at the workplace.

5. The staffing agency will require that the company:

• document and inform the agency about anticipated job hazards likely to be encountered by the temporary worker;

• review the safety and health awareness training provided by the agency to determine if it addresses recognized hazards for the company’s industry;

• provide specific training tailored to the particular hazards at the company’s worksite; and

• document and maintain records of site-specific training and provide the agency with confirmation that the training occurred, within three business days after providing the training.

6. The staffing agency will require that if the company changes the job tasks or work

location and new hazards may be encountered, the company must:

• inform both the agency and temporary worker; and

• before the worker undertakes the new tasks, inform both the agency and the temporary worker of job hazards not previously covered and update personal protective equipment and training for the new job tasks, if necessary.

7. The staffing agency will require that the company allow a temporary worker to refuse a new job task at the worksite when the task has not been reviewed or if the worker has not had appropriate training to do the new task.

8. The staffing agency will require that if the company supervises a temporary worker, the company must provide worksite-specific training to the worker and must allow the agency to visit any worksite where the worker works or will be working in order to observe and confirm the company’s training and information related to the worksite’s job tasks, safety and health practices, and hazards.

The Illinois law does not apply to professional or clerical workers.

The company using the temporary workers does not need to do anything immediately but should anticipate receiving these requests from the staffing agencies they use. Because of the enhanced pay requirements described in Item 1 above, the cost of using temporary workers is likely to rise. While the law is well-intentioned and designed to help temporary workers, it could prove to have the opposite effect. Once temporary workers’ wages rise to the floor indicated in the law, it may quickly become cost-prohibitive for Illinois employers to engage staffing agencies at all, which could mean substantial job losses for the temporary workers the law is designed to protect.

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