Labour board looks at possibility of unfair labour practice, retaliation
A Manitoba landscaping company that put a family member in charge of HR coordination has been ordered to pay damages after firing them within hours of resolving a dispute over unpaid overtime.
In a decision dated July 20, 2026, Manitoba Labour Board vice-chairperson M. Beaumont found that Alternative Landscaping Ltd. of Brandon breached the Labour Relations Act when it dismissed an HR coordinator.
The board ordered the company to pay $2,000 in damages, while declining to award further compensation for lost income.
A relative of the company's two co-owners, the employee joined Alternative Landscaping as HR coordinator in spring 2025, reporting to the office and HR manager. Within weeks, two employees handling workplace safety left, and some of their duties landed on the coordinator's desk, including a weekly early morning safety meeting that cut into core HR work.
Early starts and late finishes became routine, and the company banked those hours as flex time at a one-to-one rate, matching the offer letter. That was below the Employment Standards Code minimum, which sets banked overtime at one-and-a-half hours per hour worked. Alternative Landscaping conceded before the board that it had not compensated the overtime correctly.
A call to the provincial employment standards branch in September 2025 confirmed as much. The employee testified they learned then that the...
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