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When employees revolt!

Microsoft employees recently made the news protesting the company’s $479 million contract with the U.S. Military to create mixed reality headsets using the HoloLens platform for use in war. Click on the link if you have no clue what we are talking about, but these are basically headsets that blend reality and virtual reality into the wearer’s experience. Anyway, whatever it is Microsoft is working on something for the U.S. Military that, using this technology, “provides increased lethality, mobility, and situational awareness necessary to achieve overmatch against our current and future adversaries.”

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Cameras in the workplace: Privacy Law and inadvertently catching your employees in the act

At SpringLaw, we are interested in privacy, technology and how they intersect in the workplace.  A recent arbitration decision brought all three together and gives us some insight into how decision makers might treat evidence collected via surreptitious surveillance.

In Vernon Professional Firefighter’s Association, IAFF, Local 1517 and The Corporation of the City of Vernon the employer fire chief installed a security camera in his office. He did so based on a suspicion that someone was surreptitiously accessing confidential information held in a locked filing cabinet in his office. One morning he found the cabinet, which was usually locked, unlocked.

Instead of catching the officer snooper, one weekend the chief’s surveillance camera caught two employees engaging in a sexual act. The employees were terminated and grieved the terminations. The union brought an application to exclude the video. The decision in question addresses whether or not the video evidence was admissible.

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The Cost of Forcing an Employee to Retire

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.)

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All About Commissions

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.

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Top 5 Employment Law Cases of 2018

2018 was a whirlwind of statutory changes in the employment law world, which has perhaps overshadowed the judicial developments that have taken place in courts. In today’s post, we turn to all things case law and give our picks for the top 5 employment law cases of 2018.

  1. Amberber v. IBM Canada Ltd., 2018 ONCA 571

This one is likely to make most employment lawyers top cases of 2018 lists. We all love a good termination clause case! The law on what makes a valid “without cause” termination clause seems to change like the weather, but Amberber gives us the latest. Bear with us, here is the clause in question:

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After a Key Employee Leaves

Further to our post last week about key employees leaving, employers may wonder about risks to their business and options for recourse if that key employee leaves and sets up a competing shop next door.

There are three main potential risks presented by a departing key employee:

  • Misuse of employer confidential information
  • Setting up a competing business
  • Soliciting former employer customers
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