The size of an employee’s salary is often seen as an indicator of importance within an organization. Thus, when women are paid less than their male counterparts for performing similar work, it suggests that their efforts are somehow of lesser value. In Ontario, we have a number of legal mechanisms that are designed to reduce gender-based wage disparity, however, it remains a reality in far too many workplaces.
On January 2, the Court of Appeal for Ontario released its first decision of 2019: Heller v. Uber Technologies Inc. et al. While the new year is just getting started, this decision is likely to be one of the most significant from an employment law perspective. Its implications are far-reaching and raise novel compliance challenges for Ontario employers that contract to resolve workplace disputes by way of private arbitration.
When an employee is fired and not given sufficient notice, a common point of dispute becomes how to properly calculate the lost value of non-monetary benefits. Wages, by contrast, are a relatively simple affair. If a court orders the employee ought to have received an additional three (3) months’ notice, the parties need only calculate the value of three months’ wages and any resulting interest for the delay in payment.
In a previous blog entry, we wrote about the laws surrounding secret recordings in the workplace. As we cautioned: “[b]efore creating such recordings, be sure to think carefully about the necessity of the action and check whether any workplace policies may be engaged.”
Manchester may be best known for its premiership football teams and spawning the likes of Oasis and The Smiths, however, the City was in the headlines last month for something quite different: its Student Union (“MUSU”) voted to replace clapping at all of its events with “jazz hands” (i.e. the practice of waving open hands in the air).
This week on Twitter, our firm has been examining the minimum wage from a variety of perspectives. Using the hashtag #minimumwageweek, we shared content ranging from videos of famed economists such as Milton Friedman to historical articles on the original debate when Ontario’s minimum wage was first introduced in 1963.
On October 23, 2018 the Ford government presented Bill 47, the Making Ontario Open for Business Act. Bill 47 is set to repeal a large portion of Bill 148, the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, which was passed into law by the previous provincial government just 11 months ago.
Determining what conduct amounts to just cause for dismissal is no easy task. In part this is due to just cause being inherently situation specific. When describing what may constitute just cause, employment lawyers often refer to extreme examples: think of situations where a public-facing employee makes repeated racial slurs to a customer or commits major fraud in the course of their duties. Typically, such facts will prove fertile ground for successful assertions of just cause for dismissal by an employer.
