Illinois Chamber Sends Veto Request on General Contractor Liability Bills
Late last week, Illinois Chamber ELC Executive Director, Aaron Harris submitted a veto request letter to Governor Pritzker on HB 5412 and HB 4600. HB 5412 will unfairly shift liability for unpaid wages and benefits from subcontractors who fail to pay their workers to primary contractors who have already paid the subcontractor.
In part, the veto request letter is provided below:
While proponents of HB 5412 tout it as a bill to address “wage theft”, the Illinois Chamber believes it is better described as the “Opportunity Theft Bill”. The biggest flaw with HB 5412 is that it does not address wage theft directly with wrongdoers, but instead shifts liability to prime contractors resulting in the primary contractor potentially being forced to pay those wages twice. HB 5412 will also require contractors to pay more for wage bonds.
HB 5412 has a significant, detrimental impact on women and minority contractors. Smaller firms, those statistically more likely to be owned by women and minorities, will pay disproportionately higher rates for insurance and the surety bonds required for each project. The estimated cost of HB 5412 is a range of one to five percent of the $21 billion spent on wages and benefits in Illinois’ construction industry and would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual increased construction costs for new home, commercial, and industrial building owners.
HB 5412 is truly unfair to the most vulnerable minority and female small business owners. Prime contractors and project owners, to avoid the liability created by HB 5412, will have an incentive to exclude small and diverse firms. HB 5412, while well-intended, will have the unintended consequence of excluding small and diverse firms from construction projects.
New home construction provides essential capacity building project opportunities for small, women-owned and minority-owned construction firms. Many of the member firms that comprise Federation of Women Contractors (FWC), Hispanic American Construction Industry Association (HACIA), and Black Contractors Owners and Executives (BCOE) built their capacity as subcontractors on new home construction projects. HB 5412 will result in lost opportunity for these contractors and their workers.
Read the full letter here.
Senator Connor Resigns, Replacement Appointed
State Senator John Connor, a Suburban Democrat from the 43rd Senate District has resigned as his first term in the upper chamber neared conclusion in order to care for a family member. Connor was previously a Representative in the 85th House District, first appointed in 2017 and elected in 2018. Connor was not running for reelection in the Senate, rather he has filed to run as Judge for the 12th Circuit Court.
The Illinois Chamber thanks Senator Connor for his years of work in the Illinois General Assembly. Most recently, Senator Connor was chief-sponsor of the Chamber's security-focused BIPA reform bill, SB 3782.
Today, Firefighter Eric Mattson of Joliet was appointed to fill the remainder of the term. Mattson is currently in the Democrat primary for the 43rd Senate seat against the more progressive, Rachel Ventura. The District leans fairly heavily Democratic.
Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight Says "Illinois May be the Worst Democratic Gerrymander" in the Nation for Redistricted Maps
Earlier today, the national, statistics-based political site FiveThirtyEight analyzed the newly-enacted congressional maps for Illinois and called them the "worst gerrymander in the country drawn by Democrats." Currently, Democrats hold 13 of the 18 congressional seats in Illinois. Following redistricting in which Illinois lost a Representative, the State has been mapped to provide Democrats with 14 of 17 seats, or 82 percent of the delegation.
FiveThirtyEight says "Based on the 2020 presidential election results, this map wastes 1.9 million Republican votes. That’s almost twice the number of Democratic votes that are wasted under the map. Theoretically, if Republicans and Democrats had the same number of wasted votes in Illinois, Republicans would win 2.2 more congressional seats than under a gerrymander of this caliber..." Using this measure, compared with all other states, Illinois is worst gerrymander drawn by Democrats.
Read the full article here.
View the interactive congressional map here.
