Thanks to our Readers! Announcing our win of the Lexology Legal Influencer Award for Q2 of 2019! #influencer

  • July 16, 2019
  • News

We are super excited to announce that once again, we have been named Legal Influencers for Employment Law in the Lexology Content Marketing Awards for Q2 of 2019! We won this award in Q4 of 2018 – check out our post on that here – and are stoked that our blogging success is having staying power. I mean it’s 2019, what’s cooler than being named a #influencer?! 

This particular award recognized our blog for consistently providing useful and insightful legal analysis. Aw, thanks! 

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Accommodating Addictions

A labour arbitration decision out of Nova Scotia has got us thinking about what will qualify as addiction and justify accommodation in the work setting.  In Unifor, Local 2215 v IMP Group Ltd (Aerospace Division) (AB Grievance), [2019] NSLAA No 4, Arbitrator Richardson determined that an employee’s on the job masturbation was not justified by his reported sex addiction and upheld the employer’s decision to terminate.  

Sex Addiction

The employee in question carried out his offending behaviour in a four-stall bathroom, and though he was courteous to the extent that he did not engage in the behaviour if someone was in the stall directly beside him, he was commonly overheard by his co-workers.

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New Contracts for Current Employees

While we like to help businesses set up their employment relationships from day one, more often than not we come in to help a little later. In many typical workplaces, some employees have written contracts or offer letters, of varying levels of quality, and some don’t have any sort of written contract at all. 

Why Have a Written Contract?

Employment relationships are governed by certain terms regardless of whether or not there is a written contract. When there is nothing in writing, the employer does not get to pick these terms, or make them explicit to the employee. They just come from the common law. 

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Unauthorized Absences – When your employees are crazy sports fans!

With the huge response to the Raptors parade this week we thought it a good time to revisit the issue of unauthorized employee absences. Many employers allowed their employees the day off to go celebrate, but there were also reports showing some employees, who did not get the day off, wearing fake noses and disguises to the parade so that they would not be identified by employers should they happen to get on TV. We discussed this topic way back in 2015 when the Blue Jays and Blue-Flu were causing a bit of a dip in employee productivity. Be it baseball, the World Cup (go Canada’s Women’s Soccer team! #CANWNT) or Raptors fever, employers need to be prepared to manage their sport fan employees!

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“Avoid seductive styles” – Telling your employees how to dress

A news story caught our attention recently. The University of Quebec in the Outaouais (UQO) commissioned an instructional video for university employees instructing them on how to dress for work and then emailed it out to staff.

The four-minute video, hosted by a Gatineau based fashion stylist, provided such tips as don’t dress like you’re on vacation and “do not be in seduction style.” The stylist also advised that staff should not wear worn-out clothes or “cheap accessories.”

While we specialize in Ontario and not Quebec law, this piece certainly caused us to raise our eyebrows. Backlash from the professors at UQO has also seemingly caused the video to be taken down.  UQO says that the video was intended to provide “inspiration” and now say that “people are free to wear what they want.”

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Requiring Agility – How Much Can an Employer Change Job Duties?

At SpringLaw we work with a lot of tech companies and start-ups who are all about agility. These employers often include language in their contracts that speaks to being flexible with duties and rolling with the punches as the company scales. How flexible can employers expect their employees to be when it comes to having their roles and duties changed? And how important are these promises of agility in the employment contract? How much can an employer require an employee to change hats before risking a constructive dismissal claim? A case out of Nova Scotia sheds some light on these questions.

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