SPRINGFIELD — Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday signed two measures aimed at strengthening union protections in Illinois amid the Trump administration’s stripping of federal workers’ union contracts.
The signing comes after the Federal Emergency Management Agency joined at least three other federal agencies in canceling contracts with unions to comply with a March executive order that said collective bargaining requirements no longer applied to many federal agencies. President Donald Trump said the cancellations were allowed because the agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency, play a role in national security, a claim that labor groups are disputing in court.
“With my signature, we are restoring hard fought worker protections that Trump and Congress are trying to destroy, protections that were established under the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Coal Mine Safety Act,” Pritzker said. “This new state law means Trump can’t take these rights away from Illinois workers.”
One measure requires that the Illinois Department of Labor replace any repealed federal occupational safety standard with a state standard to protect workers across the state. A second measure signed into law changes the Prevailing Wage Act and ensures that workers are paid the Illinois prevailing wage whenever it is higher than the federal rate when federal construction projects are administered by a state or local government.
Another measure, which Pritzker signed into law in late June, eliminated references to a federal program in the Equal Pay Act to ensure that federal changes don’t undermine the state requirement that private employers with 100 or more employees report on employee wages by gender and race or ethnicity.
State Sen. Robert Peters, D-Chicago, who sponsored the worker protection measure and the equal pay provision, told the Sun-Times there’s not much the state can do about the Trump administration’s federal union cancellations. But he said the state will continue to try to find ways to expand union protections.
“We’re in a difficult dynamic because what the Trump administration’s been doing, not just when it comes to federal workers’ rights, but with everything, is they test the waters for how much they can take their authoritarian energy, particularly at the easiest option,” Peters said. “And so I think what we can look at this as is a warning for what they’re going to do next…And in Illinois, we have to resist it as much as possible, and we need the folks in D.C. who’s are also resisting as well.”
Unions have filed a complaint in federal court in California challenging the legality of the contract cancellations. Nearly a million federal employees are affected by the order, according to a spokesman from the American Federation of Government Employees’ national office. That included hundreds of EPA employees in Chicago.
