In 2008, we helped the Illinois Civil Justice League derail a dangerous anti-jobs bill in the Illinois legislature.
This bill – pushed by the personal injury trial lawyer lobby – would reinstate the Structural Work Act. This bill so dangerous to the Illinois economy that it was repealed by the state General Assembly back in 1995. Currently, New York is the only state with this obscure law.
The law would have allowed and injured worker and their trial attorney to seek damages under both the Workers’ Compensation system and Structural Work Act, thus exposing Illinois employers to a brand new layer of massive lawsuits from trial lawyers and their clients – even from those workers who are already receiving workers compensation benefits.
Under this law, plaintiffs could collect benefits under Workers’ Compensation and then sue everyone involved in the project regardless of fault, including owners, suppliers, contractors, subcontractors and designers.
We spearheaded the e-advocacy (and some earned media) functions of the effort for ICJL, including:
- The launch of DeepPocketsIllinois.com (no longer live) as the state’s premier source of information on the bill. This site also served as a portal for citizens to directly contact their legislator via email.
- Aggressive statewide email deployments that hit the inboxes of more than 100,000 Illinois voters. We were able to drive about 3,000 emails to legislators urging a “No” vote on this bill, and generated a half-dozen letters to the editor in targeted newspapers opposing to the bill.
- A live patch-through telephone call campaign that helped drive hundreds of phone calls to the offices of targeted legislators.
- We also helped with some earned media, scoring an editorial board meeting in a targeted newspaper that resulted in a strong editorial opposing the bill.
The derailing of this bill is a great victory in what is currently a very challenging political and legislative climate in Illinois.
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