Should our labour laws be updated to include an actionable right?
We’ll be unpacking the pandemic’s effects on working life for many years to come — or at least until the next one hits. Governments and public health officials didn’t exactly break the old workplace model by shuttering businesses and sending office workers home, but they did accelerate certain trends that technology had set in motion already.
We were talking about the “right to disconnect” before the lockdown winter of 2020, but the pandemic — by blurring the line between home and workplace — shone a spotlight on workers’ struggles to break free from constant electronic connection to the office. In 2015, Angus Reid said that 40% of Canadians were reporting that technology had them working longer hours. France amended its Code du travail in 2016 to compel employers to negotiate with employees to limit the use of digital tools after working hours. Several other European countries followed suit.
The federal government launched an expert panel on labour standards in 2019; it concluded later that year that a right to disconnect would be too difficult to enforce. Quebec’s legislative assembly debated a right to disconnect bill in 2018 before dropping it that same year. And that’s how things stood in Canada until Ontario passed the Working for Workers Act (WFWA), which amended the Employment Standards Act (ESA) to introduce and define a right to disconnect.
Except, it didn’t really do that. The...
A person in his 30s who demanded compensation for alleged foreign substances in cup noodles and the absence of meat in stir-fried pork was sentenced to prison in both the first trial and the appel...