An employment law blog.
Sean Bawden, Partner, Kelly Santini LLP.
sbawden@kellysantini.com | 613.238.6321
Saturday 11 August 2012
Any Day can be a Holiday
Employees' Rights to Privacy and Remedies for Their Employer's Breach of Such Right
Employers often have the actual ability to access their employees’ private email accounts. But do they have the legal right to do so?
Providing employees with mobile technology, such as smart phones, laptop computers, tablets, etc. has the potential to be a minefield for employers. As I wrote in a post titled Overtime Pay and Mobile Technology, providing employees with smart phones carries with it the real risk of exposing employers to claims for unpaid overtime.
Yet there is another risk that employers face when they provide their employees with mobile technology and fail to implement policies on the uses to which to those employees may put that technology: The risk that employees will use that technology for non-work related purposes.
Sunday 5 August 2012
Public Holidays under the Ontario Employment Standards Act
For most workers in Ontario, the first Monday in August and Easter Monday are paid days off work. However, neither is a “public holiday” as defined by the Ontario Employment Standards Act, 2000. What that means is that the rules surrounding statutory holiday pay do not apply to “the Civic holiday” or to “Easter Monday.” But, that does not necessarily mean that they cannot be treated by any particular employer as a ‘holiday;' on this point see the post Any Day Can be a Holiday.
The points above provide an opening to discuss what the rules surrounding such holidays actually are.
Thursday 2 August 2012
Explaining The Duty to Mitigate
The duty on dismissed employees to mitigate their damages following dismissal is without question the most difficult employment law concept to have to explain. The issue is difficult not because of the subject matter, but because many people that have been fired without any reason and without sufficient notice, find the legal rule that they must now act in their employer’s interest a little displeasing.
Wednesday 1 August 2012
Overtime Pay and Mobile Technology
In July of 2012, the CBC featured a story on the issue of unpaid overtime.
In that piece, the author essentially argued that, “Mobile technology has helped employers squeeze more productivity out of their employees, but all those hours of work while technically off the clock leaves them open to lawsuits over unpaid overtime.”Here is why, from an Ontario employment perspective, the CBC author may be correct.
Sunday 29 July 2012
Deemed Dismissal Results in Award of Common Law Damages
Monday 23 July 2012
The Right to be Free from Harassment... Online
In an earlier post (You Can’t Do That on the Internet) I canvassed what some Ontario Labour Relations Tribunals have done with respect to online conduct. In a July 2012 decision, Taylor-Baptiste v. Ontario Public Service Employees Union, 2012 HRTO 1393 (CanLII), the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario weighed in on the issue.