Our clients ask a lot of questions about overtime. Despite many workplaces that are trying hard to keep work hours reasonable and limit them to 40 hours per week, in busy workplaces, overtime is very often inevitable – at least once in awhile. 

There is a lot to know about overtime, more than we can cover in this post, but here are some highlights and practical tips. 

The Overtime Threshold

In Ontario, the overtime pay threshold is 44 hours per week. This is set out in the Ontario Employment Standards Act.  In some provinces, the threshold is 40 hours, but we will focus on Ontario in this post. The 44-hour threshold means that any time an employee works beyond 44 hours in a week is overtime. Employees who work overtime receive extra pay (or time off — see below) for that time. The value of overtime is 1.5 times that of regular time. In other words, an employee who works 1 hour of overtime is entitled to 1.5 hours of their regular pay.

The recent trailer for the upcoming film Bombshell depicts a hauntingly quiet elevator ride between three women who, we will soon discover, have something awful in common. The film, which will be released in December, is based on the real-life sexual harassment case against the founder and former CEO of Fox News, Roger Ailes. The women who are at the heart of this film, were employed at Fox News and brought forward the allegations against Ailes.  

Workplace Sexual Harassment in the Entertainment Industry

The topic of workplace sexual harassment is now at the center of most discussions around workplace safety and workplace culture, but it would be naive to presume that all workplaces are safer since the Me Too movement gained steam in 2017.

Certain workers, by nature of their professions, are in a particularly difficult position with regard to workplace sexual harassment. While the Me Too movement has made a very deliberate attempt to expand its outreach beyond the entertainment and media industry, often making the point that harassment occurs in all industries, individuals who work in entertainment and media do face particular vulnerabilities.

Calling all federal sector employers! Significant amendments to the Canada Labour Code come into force on September 1, 2019. That’s this coming Sunday. 

Does this apply to you?

Employers are often confused by the various workplace laws and requirements. It’s tricky to know which apply and not every law applies to every workplace. 

In Canada, the Constitution divides power between the federal and provincial governments. Here is a fun article if you want to delve more deeply into this topic. 

The Canada Labour Code is a federal law which sets out minimum employment standards for sectors that fall under federal power. These are generally sectors that go between the provinces, for example, air travel, railways and road transportation. It also applies to the telecommunications sector, banks and federal Crown corporations. 

For workplaces not involved in banking, telecommunications, air transport etc., minimum employment standards will be set by the provincial law. In Ontario, this is the Employment Standards Act. 

Yes your business’ legal issues are full of many special and unique snowflakes to litigate. And then sometimes they are not and you just need a standard contract that is relevant and applicable to your workplace. When is which? 

In the modern age of the democratization of knowledge, where online software can provide some pretty decent options to help resolve workplace issues and where legal subscription options can make legal documents and services more cost-effective, when should a business bother to hire a lawyer? 

Not always, to be frank.

Canada has just passed a new law to strengthen accessibility for people with a disability in federally regulated workplaces and organizations.

The Act to Ensure a Barrier Free Canada, also known as the Accessible Canada Act (the “Act”), came into force on July 11, 2019 and aims to create a “Canada without barriers” by the year 2040. A similar legislation – the Accessibility for Ontarian with Disabilities Act – exists in Ontario and aims to achieve this goal by the year 2025. 

The new Act will require organizations under federal jurisdiction to develop accessibility plans that account for the various barriers people with disabilities face in their built environments, when accessing services in the public, and in their employment. 

This Act will apply to the federally regulated private sector, the Government of Canada and Parliament. The Act’s primary mandate is to address accessibility issues in a proactive manner, by removing barriers before they create harm. This is significant given that a reactive response, through the human rights litigation process, has been the only impactful way to address these issues for over four decades. 

The Capital One Data Breach has been big news lately, and for good reason. It’s a big deal. This breach compromised the data of over 100 million Capital One customers. Instead of a shadowy overseas hacker or a creepy crawler from the dark web, the hacker was a former employee of the cloud hosting company through which Capital One stored their data (unconfirmed, but likely Amazon Web Services). She hacked through Capital One’s firewall to access information stored on the Amazon cloud. See women can be hackers too! This particular woman is now in US federal custody. 

Allegedly, Capital One configured a web app incorrectly, which created the vulnerability through which the hacker was able to access the server and the data. 

This situation is a nightmare for all involved – the customers, Capital One, and perhaps Amazon – and serves as a good opportunity for us to remind users about data security and workplace privacy.