BCjobs Blog

Our common law of wrongful dismissal establishes most employees’ entitlement to notice of termination (or pay in lieu) based, primarily, on the employee’s tenure. What some employers don’t know is that a court may regard that tenure as continuous through one or more breaks in service.

According a recent article by Randy Shore, published in the Vancouver Sun, the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia (ICBC) has implemented a policy banning consumption of alcohol by employees during the work day. Unfortunately for ICBC, its work day includes a lunch period for which employees are not paid.

Now that we’re into the first January of a new decade, it’s as good a time as any to assess how we perform our jobs on a day-to-day basis. Human resources managers are no different, and here are my five suggestions of things they might consider trying in 2010.

The recent Report Following a Public Interest Investigation respecting the death of Robert Dziekanski relied heavily on video evidence produced by a bystander. I’m thinking employers should get accustomed to facing such evidence of the actions of their staff.

The U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has reported that, at the time of a recent mid-air collision between an airplane and a helicopter, the air traffic controller was making a personal telephone call. The crash killed nine people and is an example of what can happen when an employee is engaged in personal business rather than focused on work duties.

I’m not a fan of the phrase, “economic meltdown”. It’s an exaggeration of the negative aspects of the current economic climate and, in Chicken Little fashion, ignores all the positives.

Hiring older workers seems to be part of an employer bandwagon. The shiny, new era of the elimination of mandatory retirement policies in British Columbia is but a few weeks old. That legal change seems to have come at an opportune moment for older workers.

Your organization could wind up with a huge financial liability if you’ve mislabelled employees as contractors. Find out your legal obligations and the respective status of both groups.