Making a Request To Change Your Work Schedule What happens when you ask your employer for some flexibility in your work schedule because of your obligations to your children? This might be especially necessary in the near future as many workers are being recalled to the workplace but your daycare and the kids’ after school programs might not be operational. You might be asking yourself some critical questions as you struggle to deal with the…

  Stuart Rudner here with another Rudner Law video employment law update. So I’ve said this before and I will say it again: do not assume that short service employees will only get minimal or no severance at all, and do not assume that every employee has an automatic probationary period, because they don’t. A recent case out of British Columbia confirms both of these points for us. The bottom line is that we have…

I have started writing this blog post three times, and each time, it seems like the landscape shifts before I can finalize it.  Initially, the prevailing view about requiring employees to be vaccinated was to proceed with caution and not to assume that an employer could unilaterally impose such requirements across the board, if at all. Then, we saw several levels of government proclaim that vaccination would be mandatory in certain contexts, such as education…

  Stuart Rudner here with another Rudner Law video employment law update. Today I want to talk about the issue of mitigation. We often talk about the fact that an employee that has been let go from their job has a legal obligation to mitigate, which means to make reasonable efforts to find new employment, and often this becomes part of the discussion when trying to negotiate a settlement with an employer, saying that the…

As work from home becomes an indefinite reality for many workers across the globe, various governments are considering whether to implement the right to disconnect. Back in 2016, before the pandemic, France introduced legislation allowing employees to turn off their work-related electronic devices outside of regular business hours. Should something like this be implemented in Canada? The Canadian government is currently considering whether the right to disconnect should be legislated.  In light of the COVID-19…

In the recent decision of Kraft v Firepower Financial, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice increased the notice period awarded to the Plaintiff by one additional month in order to account for the impact of the pandemic on the Plaintiff’s ability to find new employment. This is an important decision for employers and employees alike, as it confirms that employees who are able to provide evidence that the pandemic impacted their ability to secure…

  Stuart Rudner here with another Rudner Law video employment law update. Do you have employees in Ontario and are either operating multi-nationally or even multi-provincially? If so, your severance costs may have just dramatically increased. The reason I say that is because in Ontario we have something somewhat unique, where in addition to providing notice of dismissal, or termination pay, which we often refer to informally as severance, there is a requirement under the…