* Gov. Pat Quinn spoke to the Illinois Chamber this morning and started off his talk with a jobs announcement. According to the governor, Navistar is hiring 500 engineers here, many of them apparently brought from their facility in Indiana. We’ve known about the Navistar move for a while now, but that’s a fairly impressive number.

* Much of Quinn’s talk to the Chamber this morning was about workers’ compensation reform. The Peoria Journal Star’s editorial page laid out the problem pretty well this week…

Marc Collins, associate risk manager for CORE, compared five years’ worth of claims between the local construction firm Otto Baum Company and Sun Valley Masonry, another of their holdings in Phoenix, Ariz. The two companies are of similar size, with about the same number of employees. What he discovered was that local claims averaged $32,807 each over that time frame, compared to $6,212 in Arizona. While some of that reflects differences in wages - employers are required to pay two-thirds of an employee’s compensation while he’s hurt - it most certainly does not account for the more than five-fold difference.

Caterpillar - which obviously deals in much bigger numbers - has an even more dramatic story, one CEO Doug Oberhelman shared with Gov. Pat Quinn when he was in town last week. The Peoria-based company compared an engine manufacturing plant in Illinois to another it has in Indiana. “The jobs are essentially the same. The injury risks are the same. The production work force head count was roughly the same,” noted the company. And yet in 2008, “the total incurred cost of the injuries at the Illinois plant was seven times higher than the cost of the injuries at the Indiana plant.”

That is borne out statewide. If a hernia suffered on the job costs an employer more than $18,700 in Illinois, the next closest state comes in $6,300 less, with we flatlanders nearly 140 percent higher than the national median. A shoulder or elbow injury? The Illinois employer is out almost $24,000, compared to about $14,300 for the runner-up, 160 percent higher than the median. Need an arthroscopic procedure? Illinois is double its nearest competitor, more than triple the median.

While workers’ comp rates have been trending downward across the U.S., Illinois has experienced the opposite. It’s not just the wage coverage while injured employees aren’t working for months or even years, but the medical bills and often the settlement beyond that (all tax free, by the way). In fact, “even if the medical fee schedule were reduced by 30 percent, Illinois would still have the second highest rates in the nation, but our employers could save up to $500 million,” acknowledges the governor’s office.

The startling statistics do not end there, unfortunately. State government is an employer, too, with approaching 70,000 full- and part-time workers. And from that pool there are currently 25,000 open workers’ comp claims. That’s a breathtaking number. It is impossible to believe all of those are legitimate. [Emphasis added]

Oof.

And that state worker stat is just downright appalling.

* More from the Tribune…

Gov. Pat Quinn’s office reports that the medical fees for a hand/wrist injury are $17,180 in Illinois—nearly three times the $6,775 median in the rest of the nation. The fees for a knee injury here are $30,185— more than three times the $9,473 median in other states. Illinois has the second highest costs in the nation. And even if Illinois cut its medical fees in half, it would still be the third most expensive state in the nation.

And we’d be just barely third at that.

* We’ve talked before about Rep. John Bradley’s proposal to repeal the entire workers’ compensation system. He talked passionately the other day about his idea. Have a look…

Bradley has not yet called his bill for a vote. We’ll see what he does today.

* Watch the governor’s speech…

Chamber President & CEO Doug Whitley offered up some high praise after Quinn’s speech, saying they were “great remarks… exactly the kind of commentary that we like to hear from the chief executive officer.”

Words are not deeds, however. We’ll see what actually happens.

[Many thanks to the fine folks at BlueRoomStream.com for both videos.]

*** UPDATE *** The Chamber’s Whitley talked to the media after the event. Watch…

[ *** End Of Update *** ]

* Meanwhile, business and labor were able to negotiate a Statehouse deal on unemployment insurance, but it has some real costs for both sides…

Starting next year, Illinois businesses will see a tax increase and the recently unemployed will lose a week of jobless benefits, according to a compromise bill passed earlier this month in the Illinois Legislature.

The deal is part of a longer-term plan to help contribute to Illinois’ depleted unemployment trust fund, which owes $3 billion to the U.S. Treasury, according to a story published Monday in the Rockford Register Star.

Illinois Department of Employment Security spokesman Greg Rivara said the tax increase and benefit cut are expected to generate about $100 million for the unemployment fund next year, or about 3 percent of its debt.

Illinois is among more than 30 states that have borrowed money from the federal government to keep jobless benefits going and the state isn’t alone in reducing unemployment benefits to help funding. Michigan recently did something similar and other states are considering it.