A recent Cook County decision in Figueroa v. Visual Pak Holdings, LLC (available at Figueroa v Visual Pak 3_6_26-1-Opinion) could have major consequences for temporary workers in Illinois and for the organizations that help them enforce their rights. In March 2026, the court held that Section 67 of the Illinois Day and Temporary Labor Services Act (IDTLSA)—the provision allowing an “interested party” to sue over alleged violations—was unconstitutional. The court concluded that the statute improperly gave private organizations authority that belongs to the Illinois Attorney General.
That ruling matters because the Day and Temporary Labor Services Act is one of the key statutes protecting some of the most vulnerable workers in the state: people placed through staffing agencies into temporary jobs, often in warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and other physically demanding workplaces. The law imposes wage, benefit, and other compliance obligations on staffing agencies and on the third-party companies that use temporary labor. In 2023, Illinois strengthened the Act by expanding enforcement tools, including by allowing “interested parties”—defined broadly as organizations attentive to worker-safety or wage-and-hour compliance—to file suit after going through an Illinois Department of Labor process.
From the worker-rights perspective, that enforcement mechanism was significant. Temporary workers often face real barriers to asserting their rights on their own: fear of retaliation, job instability, language barriers, economic pressure, and the practical difficulty of challenging both a staffing agency and the company where they were placed. The “interested party” provision gave unions and worker advocacy groups another path to push systemic violations into court, even when individual workers were not in a position to lead that fight themselves. It also created additional pressure on employers to comply with the law before violations became widespread.
The court’s reasoning, however, focused on constitutional structure rather than workplace policy. The court viewed Section 67 as a kind of qui tam statute because private organizations could pursue statutory penalties on behalf of the public interest and receive 10% of any penalties recovered, plus fees and expenses. The court found two central problems: the law did not require notice to the Attorney General when a civil action was filed, and it did not give the Attorney General authority to control, dismiss, or settle the case. In the court’s view, that arrangement unlawfully displaced the state’s chief legal officer.
For workers, the immediate impact is not that the underlying protections disappeared. Other parts of the Act remain in force. Employers and staffing agencies still have compliance obligations, and workers still retain whatever direct rights and remedies the statute otherwise provides. But the ruling may narrow one of the most powerful recent enforcement tools—especially in cases where advocacy organizations were positioned to identify patterns of abuse and bring pressure beyond an individual complaint.
The broader significance of Figueroa is this: rights on paper are only as strong as the mechanisms available to enforce them. When the law limits who can bring a case, it can reduce access to justice for workers whose rights are most likely to be violated and least likely to be vindicated without outside support. That is particularly true in the temporary labor context, where workplace fragmentation often allows staffing agencies and host companies to point fingers at each other while workers bear the risk.
At the same time, Figueroa is not the end of the story. The decision could be appealed, and the legislature could respond by amending the statute to preserve a role for worker organizations while adding the notice and control provisions the court found missing. A revised law could potentially restore meaningful third-party enforcement while addressing the constitutional concerns identified by the court. More significantly, the ability for staffing agency workers to bring these claims, either individually or on a class basis, remains undiminished. Caffarelli & Associates Ltd. stands ready to help workers seeking to assert their IDTLSA rights. See our website at www.caffarelli.com for more information.
— Alejandro Caffarelli
