Paid sick leave will be standard for workers in British Columbia beginning Jan. 1, 2022, with a minimum of five paid sick days each year. B.C. becomes the first province [...]
Arbitrator declines union’s bid to overturn nuclear power plant testing policy based on federal regulations. Labour arbitration boards have served as the primary battlefield in the decades-long war between employers [...]
The payroll challenges of incorporating changes to minimum wage rates. As they do every fall, minimum wage increases took effect in many provinces in October. Adjusting for these increases can [...]
New laws would ban contacting employees while on leave or vacation. On October 25, the Ontario Assembly tabled and will almost surely pass Government Bill 27, the Working for Workers [...]
An energy company required safety-sensitive workers to pass pre-assignment drug testing before letting them work at the refinery. The company learned that a journeyman electrician the union sent to the [...]
Residual stored energy caused a machine that was supposedly locked out to start up unexpectedly and amputate a worker’s thumbs. The employer argued that it exercised due diligence to comply [...]
Three citizens claiming that there’s no decisive evidence to prove that COVID-19 poses a serious health and safety threat pose asked the court to order the Québec government to lift [...]
An elevator company had a safety policy banning workers from wearing gloves when working on moving machinery. The problem is that the worker who got his gloved hand ensnared while [...]
Sending a text message on her cell phone while her vehicle was parked at a service stop with its four-way flashers on was the last straw for a city bus [...]
Drivers and delivery personnel have filed a $400 million class action lawsuit contending that Uber improperly classified them as “independent contractors” to avoid having to pay them the ESA, EI [...]
A worker who suffers an injury in a fall while she’s off-duty and in her own home normally doesn’t qualify for workers comp. But this case was different because the [...]
An injured OR nurse and hospital couldn’t agree on a return-to-work plan. The nurse sued for disability discrimination and failure to accommodate but the Newfoundland Human Rights Commission dismissed the [...]
Does workers comp have to pay for medical marijuana legally prescribed to treat a former prison guard’s work-related post-traumatic stress disordered? After ping-ponging around the workers comp appeals tribunals, a [...]
In a bit of a role reversal, a maintenance employee was suspended 1 days and ordered to take an anger management course as a result of bullying and harassing his [...]
Four months into her articling (i.e., legal internship) term, a law student was fired for alleged plagiarism and disclosing confidential law firm information. The court concluded that neither charge was [...]
All agreed that a steel worker deserved to be disciplined for getting into a physical altercation with a co-worker on the shop room floor. The question was whether the incident [...]
A high school teaching assistant assigned to work with special need students with autism was fired just 2 months into the job. The school claimed she didn’t follow the student’s [...]
Feeling the strains of the pandemic, a business travel company put 90% of its workforce on temporary layoff. The only good news was that the company promised to maintain their [...]
A group of RCMP employees who claim they were harassed and bullied at work filed a $1.1 billion class action against their employer for “systemic negligence” in allowing the behaviour [...]
Unions objected to SaskTel’s “unilateral and arbitrary” use of pre-testing applicants for vacant positions and automatically excluding anyone who flunked from consideration. Under the collective agreement, open positions should go [...]
In 2019, the Labour Relations Board ruled that an insurance company committed an unfair labour practice by unilaterally establishing a new IT supervisor position outside the scope of the bargaining [...]
After 36 months of disability leave and no prospects, an employer decided enough is enough and terminated an administrator’s employment. The union claimed the employer violated its human rights law [...]
In the early days of the pandemic, the Ontario Chief Public Health Officer issued a directive that healthcare workers be equipped with N95 respirators to protect against exposure to aerosols [...]
A hospital fired a Kidney Care Program clerk with 14 years of service for improperly accessing a patient’s medical record. The clerk denied accessing the information; but the hospital’s witnesses [...]
A secretary who was absent from work due to illness emailed his supervisor a note from a nurse practitioner simply stating that he had to miss work for 4 weeks [...]
In March, a Nunavut court ruled that a government employee could sue both her employer, the Hamlet of Pangnirtung, and the Government of Nunavut for failing to protect her from [...]
A safety-sensitive tree utility worker got fired for flunking his drug test. The Nova Scotia labour standards officer found that there was no just cause to terminate, but the employer [...]
To control public sector wages, Manitoba adopted a 2017 law called The Public Services Sustainability Act, capping wage increases to a specified annual amount over a 4-year period. The unions [...]
Did a heavy equipment operator’s French Canadian roots factor into the decision to fire him? The BC Human Rights Commission found that there was enough evidence to allow the case [...]
