According to this NBC News story, the New Orleans police department headquarters is in such bad condition that not only are there rats everywhere, but the rats are eating the marijuana from the police evidence lockers.
“They’re all high,” the police superintendent testified in a recent hearing. (Skip to 1:45 of the video. Showing great respect, she calls them “major rodents.”)
Staffing firms and businesses in Illinois were saying “Rats!” when Illinois amended its temp staffing law in late 2023, but now they might be feeling a bit of a high.
The 2023 amendment required staffing firms in Illinois to pay their temps wages and provide benefits that were equivalent to those received by similarly situated workers of the client business where they were placed. The law caused a decline in temp staffing use in Illinois, as businesses understandably didn’t want to disclose their wage and benefit structure to staffing firms.
Last week a federal judge provided some relief, entering an injunction that prevents part of the law from taking effect.
A group of staffing agencies had filed the federal lawsuit, arguing that the state law requirement to pay equivalent benefits was unlawful and preempted by ERISA. The judge agreed, finding that ERISA is intended to promote a consistent national approach to employee benefits and that Illinois could not use state law to impose benefit requirements on staffing agencies.
Section 42 of the amended state law is titled “Equal pay for equal work,” and it requires agencies to pay temporary employees who work at a particular site for more than ninety days within a year at least the same wages and “equivalent benefits” as the lowest paid, comparable, directly-hired employee employed by the third-party client. 820 ILCS 175/42. Or, instead of providing equivalent benefits, agencies could pay “the hourly cash equivalent of the actual cost benefits.”
The law also required the staffing agencies’ clients to provide the agencies with “all necessary information related to job duties, pay, and benefits of directly hired employees” to allow agencies to comply.
Illinois businesses using staffing agencies will still be required to disclose pay information, and the requirement that staffing workers receive equivalent pay remains in effect. But the benefits portion of the law will not be enforced.
Action Item: Staffing agency agreements in Illinois may need to be updated to account for the removal of this requirement. Clients of staffing agencies should not longer be required to disclose employee benefit information.
Now about those rats. They’re eating the marijuana in evidence lockers?! I wish they had rat-cam video of that.
© 2024 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.