'The court will ask whether the employee clearly and voluntarily communicated an intention to end the employment relationship'
A British Columbia court has dismissed a worker’s wrongful dismissal claim alleging that he was forced to retire after nearly four decades with his employer.
The decision confirms that retirement is treated in law the same way as a resignation, according to Brooke Finkelstein, an employment lawyer and workplace investigator at West Coast Workplace Law in Richmond, BC.
“Although the reasons may differ, with retirement often being planned in advance and linked to age, the legal test remains the same,” says Finkelstein. “The court will ask whether the employee clearly and voluntarily communicated an intention to end the employment relationship and whether the employer accepted that communication - in law, once an employee clearly communicates an intention to retire and the employer accepts that notice, the decision becomes binding.”
The worker was a licensed agrologist hired in 1982 by Ritchie-Smith Feeds (RSF), a company providing animal feed to livestock and poultry farmers based in Abbotsford, BC. Over several years, RSF joined with Sure Crop Feeds (SCF) and McLeod’s By-Products (MBP) to create an RSF group of companies. Since 1992, the worker held managerial positions with SCF and MBP.
SCF was a small company with no formalized process for retirements – generally, an employee planning on retiring would discuss it with senior management and plan to...
A growing body of research tracking the spread of misinformation online has largely focused on presumably false stories from unreliable sources—websites that fabricate content or intentionally mis...