Illinois passes several new employment laws

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker recently signed new laws involving jury duty, discrimination, emergency responder leave and genetic discrimination.

All of them take effect January 1, 2027.

Paid jury duty leave

HB 4844 amends the Illinois jury duty law to require employers with more than 25 employees to compensate employees at their regular rate of pay for time they serve on jury duty.

It is not clear whether employers will need to pay employees for the time spent serving on jury duty when they are scheduled to work or for all hours spent serving on jury duty regardless of their work schedule. Kimberley A. Ross, a partner with FordHarrison, observed:

Section 4.1(a) of the Jury Act states that an employer cannot deny an employee who is working a night shift the necessary time off and cannot make the employee both serve on a jury and work the night shift. This section, therefore, would seemingly imply that an employer would need to give a night shift employee the time off to serve on jury duty and also compensate for that time. On the other hand, nothing in the Jury Act references part-time employment and therefore does not answer whether an employee who works part time during the week needs to be compensated for the entire time the employee is on jury duty even if that would be the equivalent of full-time work. The plain language would suggest that perhaps the employer would need to pay for the entire time on jury duty since the amendment states that the compensation is “for time that the employee served on jury duty” without qualification. If this were the case, however, a part-time employee could potentially also receive a double payment if he is working two part-time jobs for employers with more than 25 employees and both were to pay for the entire time the employee served regardless of the number of scheduled hours.

The Illinois Department of Labor (IDOL) may promulgate regulations to clear up these ambiguities, Ross said.

Notwithstanding the exemption for employers with 25 or fewer employees, an industry group representing small businesses predicted the new law will disproportionately affect small businesses. “A small business with 15 full-time employees and 11 part-time employees could be on the hook for paying a significant part of its payroll, roughly calculated 5%, for an employee to perform this public service,” Noah Finley, state director of the National Federation of Independent Businesses, said in a statement.

Several other states and localities already require compensation for jury duty.

Disparate impact

SB 3777 enshrines the disparate impact theory of discrimination in the Illinois Human Rights Act (IHRA).

Policies and practices that may appear neutral on their face but result in unlawful discriminatory effects (for example, a blanket prohibition on hiring workers with criminal records, which can disproportionately screen out minority applicants) will be a violation of the IHRA unless the employer can demonstrate that:

• The criteria or methods it used were job-related and consistent with business necessity; and
• The business necessity could not be served by an alternative practice with a less discriminatory effect.

Codifying the disparate impact theory will ensure it remains the law in Illinois “even as federal agencies are deprioritizing and rolling back disparate impact enforcement nationwide,” said the bill’s author, state Sen. Adriane Johnson.

Disparate impact liability is included in the text of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. However, last year, President Trump issued an executive order declaring disparate impact liability to be “contrary to equal protection under the law.”

Emergency responder leave

HB 1353 amends the Illinois volunteer emergency responder leave law to:

• Protect required training,
• Prohibit employers from penalizing (in addition to terminating) workers who are late or absent due to an emergency or required training, and
• Prohibit employers from requiring employees to take vacation or other compensatory time to respond to an emergency or participate in training.

Protecting volunteer emergency responders will help small localities continue to have volunteer fire and EMS departments, according to the bill’s author, state Rep. Brandun Schweizer. “In rural Illinois, many fire and EMS departments do not have the luxury of full-time crews and rely on the selflessness of volunteer first responders who hold other jobs,” he said.

Biomarker protections

SB 2886 amends the Illinois Genetic Information Privacy Act to protect biomarker testing information in addition to genetic information.

Proponents said the law will allow employees to take advantage of new blood-based tests that make it easier to detect disease earlier than ever before without sacrificing their privacy.