The Air Conditioning Contractors of America (ACCA) announced that it sent a letter to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules on behalf of HVACR contractors in Illinois, urging the committee to review and overturn the recently approved emergency rule by the Illinois Workers Compensation Commission (IWCC) regarding workers’ compensation.

The rule deems that any essential worker in Illinois who contracts COVID-19 will be assumed to have contracted it while on the job and, therefore, eligible for workers' compensation funds. This is problematic because employees are not required to produce evidence that they were infected on the job. This runs contrary to more than 100 years of workers' compensation law and may derail the system that distributes payments to workers across Illinois with injuries of all types sustained on the job. ACCA has worked closely with Federated Insurance on this issue, and it is the organization's hope that the IWCC takes rapid action to overturn this misguided policy.

“This policy would place an unnecessary financial burden on our members in a time that’s already extremely difficult for small businesses,” said Barton James, ACCA president and CEO. “ACCA will continue to push back against this policy in Illinois, as well as any other policy across the country that puts undue stress on HVACR contractors.”

ACCA has also issued an Action Alert, urging individuals to send a letter to their elected state officials to overturn Illinois’s Workers Compensation Commission Rule.

The letter ACCA sent to the Joint Committee on Administrative Rules regarding workers’ compensation can be read online.

For additional information, contact Deb Weiner, ACCA manager of communications and strategic partnerships, at deb.weiner@acca.org or 703-824-8862.