All About Overtime

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.

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Canada Labour Code Amendments Coming into Force

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. 

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Standard versus Snowflake Workplace Legal Issues

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.

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Accessible Canada Act – The Act to Ensure a Barrier Free Canada

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. 

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Workplace data theft – Protect your company with best practices

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. 

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Texting at work

Let’s face it, we are all addicted to our phones. Some of us have jobs where our phones are required to be locked up in a locker for the day and we only have access to them on breaks. As a desk worker – who does not have to lock up her phone – I can only imagine the agony! 

Time spent on a personal device can interfere with work and productivity. Ever fall into an Instagram trance and next thing you know 2 hours have passed? Sure, you haven’t…

Personal devices and the persistent distractions of the digital era can be a problem for employers. In certain workplaces, distraction by a digital device can be dangerous or bad for customer relations. I’m sure we’ve all been kept waiting at some point by an employee who was giggling into their phone instead of helping us. 

So, what can employers do?

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