A Florida car thief may want to reconsider his career choice.
A Miami Beach man walked back to his Corvette after a Starbucks run, only to find a wannabe thief trapped inside. The thief became trapped inside because the car has electrical locks and no manual door handle. The car requires a key to unlock the doors.
The thief begged the car’s owner for help, but without success. The car’s owner videotaped the ridiculousness and called the police. That’s bad news for the thief.
Business owners in Illinois had much better news recently, when Gov. Pritzker signed amendments to the state’s temporary worker law. The law was last amended in 2023, when it created new burdens for businesses using staffing agency temp labor. (See here and here.)
The main problem business owners had with the 2023 amendment was that staffing agencies were required to pay temps “not less than the rate of pay and equivalent benefits” of comparable employees at the business where they were providing services. The only way staffing agencies could ensure compliance with this requirement was to obtain wage and benefit data from its client. Obviously, businesses did not want to provide that information. (A court decision struck down the “equivalent benefits” requirement.)
Under the 2024 amendment, a staffing agency can now comply with the pay requirements in two ways.
First, it can match the straight-time hourly rate of a comparator employee who works directly for the client, as before.
Second, they can now determine compensation without the need for comparator data from the client business. Under the amendment, the staffing agency can instead comply with the pay requirements by paying its workers based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The pay requirements do not apply until a temp worker has worked 720 hours at the client business within a 12-month period.
The change to the law means that businesses retaining staffing agencies in Illinois will no longer be required to provide wage and benefits information about its comparator employees. The client, not the staffing agency, gets to choose whether to provide the data and, if the client chooses not to provide it (which I expect will most often be the case), the agency must use the BLS formula.
There are other changes to the law too, including amended benefit requirements, notice requirements, and the right of temp workers to decline to cross a picket line.
Staffing work might not pay great, but laws like the Illinois temp worker law seek to ensure a minimum level of pay for temp workers. The Miami Beach car thief may want to look into steady work like that instead, if he ever gets out of the Corvette.
© 2024 Todd Lebowitz, posted on WhoIsMyEmployee.com, Exploring Issues of Independent Contractor Misclassification and Joint Employment. All rights reserved.
