January 25th, 2010
Our customers can best use our service if they understand the REASON why courts award severance pay and why employers pay severance packages. You have a contract with your employer. Therefore, if your employer decides to terminate the contract, they have to compensate you for terminating that contract. Severance pay is intended to put you in the same position that you would have been if you had been given proper notice.
Severance pay at its most basic includes the wages and vacation pay that you would have received if you had stayed with your employer during the length of the notice period. Included in your severance pay may also be other employment benefits (like bonuses) that would have been paid to you during this time.
This means that it should be more than just your cash salary, you have the right to receive all of the benefits and other compensation you would have received if you had kept working up to the end of your notice period.
If, for example, your employer owes you a notice period of four months, and your employer chooses to pay you a severance package, your payment should be more than four months’ of your salary.
It should also include:
- bonuses you would have earned and been paid during the four months
- stock options you would have earned that would have vested during the four months
- RRSP contributions
- medical coverage
- extended medical coverage
- dental coverage
- long-term disability insurance
- short-term disability insurance
- life insurance
If you have a fixed-term employment contract, severance pay is based on the wages and benefits that you would have earned until the end of the fixed term, unless there is an early termination clause.
Thicken My Wallet, a blog providing general financial advice, gives general advice on severance pay here: http://www.thickenmywallet.com/blog/wp/2009/02/10/severance-pay-what-am-i-entitled-to-part-i/
Tags: dismissed, laid off, severance, wrongful dismissal, wrongful dismissal duty to mitigate mitigation severance package
Posted in Employment Law | No Comments »
January 19th, 2010
The Lawyers’ Weekly Magazine, one of Canada’s most widely distributed legal publications for lawyers, featured FiredWithoutCause.com in its most recent article on employment law. We’re very pleased to be seen as a complementary service to traditional legal services delivered by lawyers rather than as competitors to lawyers. For those individuals who simply cannot afford a lawyer or for those people who just want to know their basic rights before consulting a lawyer, the article, I think, fairly presents us as a low cost solution for those situations.
To read the articl
Next week, we’re back after our Christmas break with some more information on employment law.
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December 28th, 2009
The National, the Canadian Bar Association’s magazine has recognized http://www.firedwithoutcause.com:
By automating and streamlining necessary but straightforward and/or repetitive tasks, sites such as … FiredWithoutCause can offer legal services more quickly and cheaply than the average law firm associate, or even the average legal secretary. And by lowering or outright eliminating the bar on legal fees, they can tap into … the average consumer or small business owner who would never consult a lawyer because they find lawyers too expensive. (S. Goldberg, “The new competition”, National, December 2009, pp. 8-9)
At Paradigm Shift Solutions, we believe that improving access to justice in Canada will not improve by asking lawyers to increase pro bono or volunteer work or working for less. We can improve access to justice by creating new business models that empower Canadians with legal information and provide proportionately priced services.
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December 28th, 2009
A big thank you to http://www.law21.ca and Jordan Fulong for nominating our blog for the 2009 Clawbies. We didn’t seek or expect the nomination, but we thank this prominent Canadian legal blogger for noting us. We intend to keep on giving Canadians plain language information about severance packages, wrongful dismissal, and employment law.
http://www.law21.ca/2009/12/07/2009-clawbies-now-accepting-nominations/
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December 21st, 2009
We here at FiredWithoutCause.com want to wish everyone the best of the holiday season. We will be taking a short holiday from blogging until the new year. However, when we return, you’ll see more information about calculating severance packages, wrongful dismissal, pregnancy and severance, negotiation techniques, and so much more. We look forward to seeing you again in 2010!
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December 3rd, 2009
Many employees don’t know that they have what is called a duty to mitigate. That is, if you lose your job you are under legal obligation to do everything you can reasonably do to find another one.
When employees sue for wrongful dismissal, an employer’s first defense is often to claim that the employee has failed to mitigate his or her damages.
This means the court will require you to demonstrate that you’ve tried to find a job.
You can do this by showing that you’ve been: checking the newspaper and the classified adverts, doing any necessary networking, or submitting your resume to different potential employers. There’s any number of different ways that you can demonstrate this, but you have to show that you’ve made every reasonable attempt to find a job.
The key word is reasonable.
If you have an illness, or some other concern that makes it impossible to look for another job, you must show that this concern has prevented you from finding a job, and that as soon as this concern has been addressed you will continue looking for a job.
But what if employment conditions are poor and there are simply no jobs available?
The extent to which an employer can argue that you should be looking for a job that requires a lesser skill set is questionable. How reasonable is it for you to accept a lower paying position, or a less prestigious position with fewer duties?
The courts will generally require that you accept another job within reason, which may include slightly less pay or slightly less responsibility. You won’t, however, be required to find something that is dramatically below the level of what you’ve been doing.
It won’t, for instance, be expected that a chief executive officer (CEO) would take a frontline service position at the customer line. However, this person would still need to demonstrate that he or she was willing to take something other than a CEO position, like a middle management position, depending on the kinds of companies that have been solicited.
Tags: wrongful dismissal duty to mitigate mitigation severance package
Posted in Employment Law | 1 Comment »
November 18th, 2009
The first thing you do after you lose your job (whether you call it fired, terminated, axed, or whatever) are extremely important and can dictate whether you receive a good settlement from your employer without too much trouble.
The first hour after you’ve been terminated is incredibly stressful, even, perhaps, one of the most devastating times in a person’s life. A whole host of emotions run through you, everything from anger to resentment, from depression to disillusionment, and from rejection to a new uncertainty about your life.
It is really important not to make any rash decisions.
Often, what many employers will do is to provide ’spot offers’ upon termination. That is, they’ll have you sign a piece of paper promising you a package of money. What you are often doing, though, is waiving your right to ask for future money.
It’s also not unusual for an employer to not offer any package at all, expecting that the employee will simply not understand his or her legal entitlement to notice.
So, in that first hour after you’ve been terminated or told that you’ll be terminated from your job, it’s important not to react. Simply ask whether there is any severance offer on the table, how much notice will be given and how the process of termination will occur.
Don’t say anything, don’t respond, and most importantly, don’t offer anything else. Take the information that your employer is giving you, and ask for some time to consider your options.
Then, that evening, consider your options, think about what you want and come up with your counter offer (you may want to read our Seven Steps to Improving Negotiations paper to understand the difference between what you need, what you’re entitled to and what you want). If your employer has given you a settlement package you may want to consider that. You’ll also want to take the time to call a lawyer, your financial advisor, or your tax advisor to understand what your various options are, and to assess your package. Then you’ll be prepared to go back to your employer the next day with a fair counter proposal.
By keeping calm and not reacting, you will avoid signing any documents or entering into any agreement that you’ll regret, an agreement which may involve waving the legal rights that you have by common law.
Tags: counter-offer, dismissed, laid off, negotiation
Posted in Employment Law | No Comments »
November 16th, 2009
Hi everyone, apologies for not being in more regular touch with all of you. For what it’s worth, my wife and I just had our first baby and I took some time off from my outreach activities to enjoy these first few days. Thanks to my business partner, Jim Hamlin, for keeping our business going.
While we’ve been a bit silent, we’ve been busy. I thought I would update you on some of the improvements that we have been working on:
- re-working our customer experience and intend to roll out a new user interface and workflow very shortly. Thanks to everyone for your great feedback on how to improve our service.
- working on a major upgrade to our database. After our upgrade, we will have more indexed, publicly accessible cases than any of our competitors. We are working on providing full-text cases for most, if not all, of our indexed cases. This upgrade is a major effort for us as we comb through decades of case research. After our upgrade though, we can provide summary results that are more comprehensive, accurate, and relevant.
- making it easier for repeat customers to access information in their accounts.
In related products, our company Paradigm Shift Solutions is working on two other products to bring “law to the people” and we’re pretty excited about that too. Keep checking for more information.
Meanwhile, check out our new temporary home page and media page where we have listed all of the fantastic media coverage we have received over the past three since our opening. I am especially proud to say that the Canadian Bar Association’s magazine recently covered us in their October/November issue as a “sign of the future” in the legal profession. As a lawyer myself, it’s nice to know that we are doing something to improve access to justice for Canadians: http://www.cba.org/CBA/PracticeLink/leadership_technology/online_services.aspx.
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October 7th, 2009
If your employer chooses to end your job, they must give you a certain amount of notice. The amount of notice you get is determined by three factors, in order of priority:
- Provincial employment standards
- Your contract or union collective agreement
- Common law
Here’s what that looks like in real-life terms.
1. Provincial employment standards:
Your employer can never give you less than what an employment standards statute says. So, in B.C., if you’ve been working for your employer a year, you get at least two week’s notice, no matter what.
2. Your contract or union collective agreement
If you have a contract (usually written) with your employer that contains an agreement about how much notice you’ll get if you lose your job, your employer must give you what’s in that contract, so long as it’s more than what the statute gives you. This applies for union collective agreements too. If you have a fixed-term employment contract, your notice period should be until the end of the fixed term, unless there was an early termination clause.
3. Common law
If you don’t have a contract with your employer, then you get what the common law gives you. Since the 1950s, Canadian courts have consistently applied the same variables with no exceptions. They look at your age, your length of service with the company, the kind of job you had (front-line, supervisor, manager, professional, executive, etc.), and how long it would reasonably take you to find another job. The first three variables are clear-cut. But the last variable – how long it would reasonably take you to find another job – can be very difficult to prove without a huge up-front investment in research. Therefore, the courts most often spend a lot of time on the first three variables.
In all cases, courts will compare your age, length of service, and kind of job against previously decided cases and make a judgment call based on precedents set in similar cases.
Posted in Employment Law | No Comments »
October 2nd, 2009
I want to address two topics today:
- what happens when you are terminated while on leave; and,
- why don’t we provide more case specific information.
We were asked recently to consider a situation that made me think of post. It wouldn’t be right of me to get into details that I think were sent to me in confidence. However, let’s just say that an employee seemed to me to have been treated poorly, but the customer was asking why we don’t provide cases organized by specific situations, such as termination while pregnant, or termination while on disability leave, or other such circumstances.
I thought I could share my response with everyone, which I edited to leave out confidential information:
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There are an unlimited number of potential categories that one could define. It would not be possible to design a solution that could anticipate all potential unique facts that employees may encounter and so lawyers, and our service, focus on the key variables of age, length of service, type of job. Our service attempts to balance two needs: 1) to provide reasonably useful information to our customers about their notice entitlements; and 2) to do so at an affordable cost our customers. To get very specific and tailored information that you seek, you would need to consult a lawyer, but then pay their fees – significantly higher than ours. Most of our customers use our service to determine whether what their employers offered is “in the ballpark” so that they can make a more informed decision about whether to engage a lawyer – to know whether to start spending money on legal fees is worth it. This is not to say that we discourage customers from contacting lawyers. Quite the opposite. As our tutorial states, we encourage our potential customers to consult a lawyer if they wish information that is precisely specific to their situation.
Generally speaking, that a mother is on … leave … does not generally, in itself, increase or decrease the specific applicable notice period. However, terminating a person in this way increases the risk that an employer has engaged in “bad faith” conduct which could increase the damages to which an employee would be entitled. We refer to these “bad faith” damages situation in our tutorial….which our service does not cover.
If you wish to obtain cases involving wrongful dismissal of people … dismissed while [on leave] then I would encourage you to go to the Canadian Case database, where we draw our cases from, which is a database created by a consortium of law all courthouses in Canada, and enter in these search terms in the search box. You can then review all of the cases that match that search query: www.canlii.org. Hopefully, our service, combined with a scan of cases in canlii will get you closer to what you need.
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Maybe some of you will also find www.CANLII.org useful. Many of our customers often use them in tandem. Using us as a starting point, finding the right cases on CANLII (Canada’s case database maintained by the courts) and then delving deeper on their own. Many of them find that we provide a great starting point since a query search on CANLII typically produces results like Google searches, a LOT of junk that you have to sift through - a very time consuming exericse that we’ve already undertaken.
Tags: Add new tag, disability, dismissed, laid off, leave, pregnancy
Posted in Employment Law | No Comments »
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