The dust has settled post-pandemic and employees are out of sorts. Turnover is high across all industries as people regroup and sort through what they want out of their career.
We regularly hear about employees resisting commuting, moving on quicker than ever when the job gets difficult, and when regular feedback gets uncomfortable.
Accommodating employees with disabilities and medical issues is an integral part of creating an inclusive and equitable workplace. But what should an employer do if they receive a request for accommodation that does not provide enough information? How can we balance an employee’s right to privacy with an employer’s need for sufficient information to assess an accommodation request?
What is the duty to accommodate?
Under the Ontario Human Rights Code, employers have a legal duty to accommodate the needs of people with disabilities. This duty has both a procedural and a substantive component. This means that both the procedure used to assess the accommodation and the actual substance of the accommodation provided are important for employers to fulfill their duty.
However, the duty to accommodate is not absolute. Employers must accommodate to the point of undue hardship. Employers do not need to provide an accommodation if it would cause undue or excessive hardship, such as onerous costs or health and safety risks.
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Employers may brush off the importance of a Record of Employment (ROE) or even have their accountant handle all the details, but it is an important document in the realm of employment law. This document becomes significant when it comes to topics such as terminations, lay-offs, resignations, disability, illness, quarantine, a leave of absence and maternity or parental leaves. So here are the top 6 things that every employer should know when it comes to a Record of Employment.
Firstly, what is an ROE?
An ROE is a form that employers complete for employees who are receiving insurable earnings who have stopped working and are experiencing an interruption of earnings. This document is a requirement of the Employment Insurance Program. An ROE must be completed even if the employee is not applying for Employment Insurance Benefits.
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.
A labour arbitration decision out of Nova Scotia has got us thinking about what will qualify as addiction and justify accommodation in the work setting. In Unifor, Local 2215 v IMP Group Ltd (Aerospace Division) (AB Grievance), [2019] NSLAA No 4, Arbitrator Richardson determined that an employee’s on the job masturbation was not justified by his reported sex addiction and upheld the employer’s decision to terminate.
Sex Addiction
The employee in question carried out his offending behaviour in a four-stall bathroom, and though he was courteous to the extent that he did not engage in the behaviour if someone was in the stall directly beside him, he was commonly overheard by his co-workers.
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