Posts Tagged ‘dismissed’
Monday, 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 »
Wednesday, 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 »
Friday, 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 »
Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Last week’s Statistics Canada unemployment figures showed a significant increase in the number of people working part-time. I thought I would briefly address this point and what it means for wrongful dismissal. The short answer is: you are still entitled to notice before your job ends.
Whether you work full-time, overtime, one day a week, or five-half days a week, you are still governed by an employment contract. And, like all other contracts, but especially employment contracts, if someone wants to terminate the contract - unless there is a legally binding clause that deals with termination and notice - you have to give the other person reasonable notice that the contract is ending.
So, if you are working part-time, and you lose your job, you are still entitled to reasonable notice. Of course, the amount of salary you receive will reflect the fact that you are working part-time. Let’s say that our Calculator tells you that courts in cases similar to yours have awarded notice periods of approximately 2 months. A full-time employee at your level gets a salary of $1,000 month (just illustrating here). You, as a part-time employee, earn $500 per month. Based on this calculation, you might want to target a severance package that pays you salary equivalent to $1,000 (2 months x $500) whereas the full-time employee will get double that: $2,000.
Where part-time employees can really be hurt from wrongful dismissal is in the area of benefits. Many employers offer benefits to full-time employees, but not part-time employees. Full-time employees can often negotiate a situation where they can continue to receive their benefits, such as extended health, during their notice period while they look for another job. If you don’t have those benefits, then there is nothing to receive during the notice period.
This is an interesting point for our government to consider by the way. As the number of part-time workers increase, we will need to consider, as a society, how this will affect our social programs as demand for them increases when the number of people receiving private benefits decrease.
Tags: dismissed, part-time
Posted in Employment Law | No Comments »
Monday, June 1st, 2009
Welcome to FiredWithoutCause.com!
We are thrilled to launch this unique legal information service in Canada to help people who have lost their jobs. Whether you call it getting fired, laid off, dismissed, or let go – we empower Canadians who have lost their jobs by sharing with them important information about their legal entitlements and obligations.
My name is Chilwin Cheng, one of the co-founders of FiredWithoutCause.com. In this first blog post, I’d like to introduce myself and tell you a bit about the company.
I am a practicing lawyer in the City of Vancouver, Province of British Columbia, Canada. For many years, I’ve practiced as a litigator, helping people resolve disputes with others – whether that meant helping them negotiate a solution or helping them through arbitration or a court. I’ve seen my fair share of wrongful dismissal disputes, helping both employees and employers.
It’s tough to see friends and family lose their jobs in this current economic downturn. With the high cost of legal advice and services, I saw this as a unique and innovative way to help Canadians gain affordable access to information about their legal rights.
So, with that dream in mind, I teamed up with my co-founder Jim Hamlin to create Paradigm Shift Solutions Inc. We were both MBA students at Simon Fraser University’s Executive MBA programs and study team members for two years. Combining my employment law experience and Jim’s software experience, we created Canada’s first innovative, direct-to-consumer web-enabled commercial legal information service.
We decided to tackle the issue of delivering wrongful dismissal information to people as our first product. Why did we choose wrongful dismissal as our first area?
Three reasons:
- Almost everyone has been fired, let go, or dismissed at some time in his or her working life. This traumatic event touches everyone.
- In my experience, it’s an event where people can really benefit from even a little bit of information about their legal entitlements.
- While it’s an area of the law where people could benefit the most from some help, the need comes at a time when many people feel least able to afford legal services.
At a time when many people feel least able to afford to hire a lawyer, FiredWithoutCause.com helps people understand their situation and make informed choices. We talk about the employment contract, severance periods, and basic negotiation. We provide:
- a simple, plain-English tutorial on employment law, contracts, and severance periods and payments
- a manual on how to develop and present your counter-offer
- access to a database, assembled by lawyers and paralegals, containing thousands of cases on wrongful dismissal from across Canada
- template counter-offer letters, drafted by employment lawyers
We’ll use this blog as a way of sharing information about employment law and wrongful dismissal. In our next post, I’ll talk about how employment law works and why Canadians even get termination packages.
We’re excited about this service. We’d love to hear from you about topics you’d like more information on and we’ll include them in our next blog posts.
Tags: counter-offer, dismissed, employee, employer, Employment Law, fired, laid off, lawyer, legal aid, litigation, litigator, negotiate, negotiation, pro bono, severance, wrongful dismissal
Posted in Company Announcements | No Comments »
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