Valentine’s Day has us thinking about romance. In the mind of an employment lawyer, the leap from romance to harassment is a short one, and so that is what our post is about today. Harassment is not a new topic for us. You can read our past posts on sexual harassment, employer obligations regarding harassment and the time we waste on sexual harassment for a primer on the subject.

Today we are going to take a look at what comes after the harassment has been reported, investigated and substantiated. What are the consequences of harassment?

Here Come the Robots

Is your workplace about to be automated? A recent study by McKinsey & Company suggests that about half of the activities (not jobs) carried out by workers could be automated right now with currently available technologies.  The study assessed 2000 work activities across more than 800 occupations, including mortgage brokers and CEOs.  Those are a lot of activities affecting a wide range of occupations.

As kids, we learned that telling the truth was the right thing to do, but ask a lawyer and this golden rule is likely to become a little bit tarnished! However, a recent decision about honesty when providing a former employee with a reference might make us all feel a little better about telling the truth.

Kanak v. Riggin

On January 17, 2019, the Supreme Court of Canada denied leave to appeal in the case of Kanak v. Riggin. In 2018, the Ontario Court of Appeal upheld the 2017 trial judge’s decision which gave the thumbs up to honesty when it comes to giving employee references.

In this case, Ms. Kanak, a former employee of Mr. Riggin, was offered a job conditional upon a positive reference check. Ms. Kanak gave Mr. Riggin as her reference. When contacted by the new employer, Mr. Riggin was honest with his feedback, which led the new employer to rescind the job offer. Ms. Kanak then sued Mr. Riggin for defamation. She plead that he was motivated to make unflattering statements about her by malice, spite and a desire for revenge.

Notice periods are trending upwards. One reason for this is that people are not necessarily retiring at 65 anymore, leading employers to struggle with how to exit the older employee for either declining performance reasons (real or perceived) or to simply make room for new talent.

As an example of the high-risk employers face when trying to push out an older worker without a fair package, in Dawe v. Equitable Life Insurance Company, 2018 ONSC 3130, the employee was awarded a 30 month notice period.  Mr. Dawe was terminated from his position as Senior Vice President of the Equitable Life Insurance Company at age 62.  Mr. Dawe had worked from Equitable Life and its predecessor company for 37 years. In his last year of work, Mr. Dawe earned a base salary of $249,000 and a STIP and LTIP bonus totalling $379,585. (We will cover the award for this bonus in a future post.)

We put a lot of work into making our blog readable and relevant and were thrilled to see all that work paid off in 2018.

We are excited to announce that we recently won TWO 2018 legal blogging awards! We are so grateful to our readers for your ongoing support, helpful topic suggestions and feedback.

We want to share all the deets with you!

Employment arrangements with different kinds of compensation are common and can present a lot of questions when it comes to a termination. In this post, we will look at how the law treats commissions.

Notice Pay

Readers of our blog will know by now that when an employee is terminated without cause they are entitled to notice. How much notice will depend on whether or not there is a contract, the age of the employee, the character of the employment, the length of time the employee worked with the employer, etc. We usually talk about notice in terms of number of months.