Labour & Employment

So the decision has been made to terminate an employee, and you are in charge of delivering the bad news.  As difficult as that may be for you, it will undoubtedly be more difficult and uncomfortable for the employee.   Below are a number of practical tips to reduce the stress, tension and p…

Or maybe not.  But there is a new resource that is freely available to anyone with access to the internet which provides interesting reading for anyone with an interest in employment law. CanLII (it’s short for the “Canadian Legal Information Institute”) maintains a searchable database of ca…

There has been lots of press coverage respecting a number of class actions by employees who claim that they have been improperly denied overtime pay.  The reality is that actions by individual employees are unlikely to be commenced as the legal fees relative to the potential recovery make su…

In the wake of belt-tightening budgets from government and a growing sense that labour relations are entering a more difficult period in both the public and private sectors, an article in last weekend’s Globe and Mail by John Allemang makes for interesting reading – whether your organization…

In July 2011, I posted a blog on Temporary Layoffs – A Lesson for Unwary Employers.   Since then, on December 23, 2011, the Ontario Court of Appeal released an important decision dealing with temporary layoffs. This decision can be found at Elsegood v. Cambridge Spring Service (2001) Ltd. Th…

There are lots of employers in Ontario who have decided to exclude their executives from WSIB coveragein order to reduce those expensive premiums. The cost-savings can be significant but it is vital to ensure that you have the correct insurance coverage in place to pick up the slack. A recen…

You may think that the WSIB pays benefits to a worker for traumatic mental stress only in situations where the worker was involved in a situation perceived as or actually life-threatening. And you would have been right until recently, when the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board Appeals Tri…

As an employment lawyer, I am often approached by clients on the issue of “independent contractors versus employees”. Corporate clients look to use independent contractors, rather than employees, to perform work more cheaply and with more flexibility – without costs such as CPP, EI, EHT, WSI…

We’re all familiar with the classic scenario when the response to a termination by an employer prompts the response, “You can’t fire me. I quit!”. But after the dust settles from the initial blow-up, what happens next? A recent case from the British Columbia Court of Appeal is instructive. I…

I’ve often said that my job is mostly about people behaving badly at work, so the fact situations underlying the cases I read are often all too human in nature.  Consider the case of Winnie, who was fighting with her common-law husband about money. She wasn’t convinced he was actually paying…