There are only a handful of essential services that are now requiring people to come in these days, with social distancing now being the norm in the midst of this COVID-19 outbreak (thank you to all the health care workers out there!!). While the trend has certainly been growing in recent years, working remotely is still fairly unusual. 

How to Remote

How is your workplace handling the transition from in-person to remote? We’ve blogged about remote working in the past and you can read our myriad of tips and tricks on our blog:

• How to Remote Work Well
• Remote Workers: Pros, Cons and Tips
• Public Health Emergencies and the Workplace
• Whose device is it anyway?

FAQs for Employers – Frequently asked questions by employers needing more information on the impact, rules and best practices for addressing the global coronavirus outbreak. (Last Updated March 17, 2020).

Further free resources can be found here.

Should you need legal advice on how to manage your workplace during the COVID-19 outbreak, please get in touch.

I think we can all agree that the world is a little bonkers lately –  it seems like things are changing and getting more serious by the minute. Between the time I thought I was finished writing and ready to press “publish” Ontario declared a state of emergency. 

We are getting lots of questions from employers about what to do in the face of various impacts from COVID-19, as more and more measures come into place and make it harder for us to go about our daily lives and work.  

For some, businesses are shutting down and contracts to provide services are being cancelled. This is causing employers to think about how to scale back and how to be fair to their employees while also staying afloat. 

FAQs for Employers – Frequently asked questions by employers needing more information on the impact, rules and best practices for addressing the global coronavirus outbreak. (Last Updated March 16, 2020).

Further free resources can be found here.

Should you need legal advice on how to manage your workplace during the COVID-19 outbreak, please get in touch.

Workplace privacy is an evolving and somewhat muddy area of law. In Ontario, our key employment law statutes, the Employment Standards Act and the Occupational Health and Safety Act, are silent on the issue of privacy. Yet surveillance is ubiquitous. Employers often have cameras in the workplace, which end up providing them information about their employees, whether they were seeking it or not. Employers and employees often wonder, is this legal?

PIPEDA and Video Surveillance

The Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPIEDA) is a privacy law that applies to private-sector organizations across Canada that collect, use or disclose personal information in the course of commercial activity. PIPIEDA defines a commercial activity as any particular transaction, act, or conduct, or any regular course of conduct that is of a commercial character, including the selling, bartering or leasing of donor, membership or other fundraising lists.

Sometimes employees just kind of stop coming to work, leaving employers scratching their heads and wondering where they stand and what to do.

Absence Due to Illness

In many cases when an employee stops coming to work they will tie their absence to illness. Ever get this text? “hey can’t come in today, am sick.” Often an employee will call or text or email in sick for the first few days and then stop communicating. 

The connection to illness complicates the matter for employers, who have a duty under the Ontario Human Rights Code (“the Code”) to accommodate employees with disabilities up to the point of undue hardship.