Columnists
Heavy on the fluff
Ontario’s next election will be held on Jun 2, 2022—and already Doug Ford’s Conservatives are pawing at the ground. There is a limit on the amount a political party can spend in the six-month period before a campaign begins, and the party is flush with cash—so they’ve been spending some of it recently on ads that offer a peek at the carnage to come.
They’ve got their positive message all ready. “We’re the party saying yes,” says Ford. “Yes to building highways you can drive on so you don’t sit in gridlock. Yes to building homes more families can afford…We’re the only party looking to the future and we’re ready to build.” And the negative message too. Liberal leader Steven Del Duca is criticized for being Kathleen Wynne’s right hand man, while NDP leader Andrea Horvath is accused of saying one thing and doing another.
And there is another sign an election is near. That’s when the government starts enacting legislation that is calculated to appeal to popular sentiment (heavy on the fluff), without at the same time costing much money (light on the treasury). And we have it here. The legislation is Bill 27—the Working for Workers Act, 2021—which has passed first reading and gone to committee.
The WFW Act will impose a requirement that every employer with 25 or more employees develop a policy on “disconnecting from work,” which is defined as “not engaging in work-related communications, including emails, telephone calls, video calls or the sending or reviewing of other messages, so as to be free from the performance of work.” The legislation aims to establish expectations about response time for emails and to permit employees to turn on out-of-office notifications when they aren’t working.
According to the government’s press release, “this proposed legislation would make Ontario the first jurisdiction in Canada to make it easier for people to relax and spend quality time with their loved ones…Ontario is prioritizing workers’ mental health and family time.” Who could be against that? Ebeneezer Scrooge? Jeff Bezos? Neither one of them is an Ontario voter. And who would not want to spend this quality family time driving Mr. Ford’s new Bradford bypass and Highway 413 projects, also announced just a few days ago.
But is the WFW Act useful, or is it just a set of empty words? Might the government just as well have tabled the Be Kind to Puppies Act or the Helping Little Old Ladies Across the Street Act? It won’t work well in many business cultures. I used to work in a large law firm, and when a client needed work done by a certain time, by golly you did it however many extra hours it took you, because serving the client was always the top priority. Employers who need the staff to work the extra hours can usually find a way to reward those who are prepared to so, and not reward those who just put in their shifts. I can foresee more litigation arising over the ‘right to refuse’ off-hour demands and the ‘right to dismiss’ employees who won’t play ball. I can also see problems for firms with not many more than 25 employees finding enough to staff to cover the overtime foregone by disconnecting employees.
On a more positive note, perhaps this legislation will make those firms that develop worker-friendly disconnection policies more attractive to employees, leaving service-intensive firms to fight that much harder to recruit and retain. The requirement to create, communicate and update a written disconnection from work policy will only serve to empower employees, which is a good thing. Whether they use it to their advantage will be up to them.
The WFW Act would also outlaw non-competition clauses in employment agreements and policies, in order to provide job seekers greater career mobility. It would prevent a company like McDonald’s from stipulating that a hamburger flipper could not defect to Harvey’s to do the same job. It would also theoretically apply at a higher up level—say to Rogers when it fires its CEO, as it regularly does; but the government says that more narrowly drafted intellectual property preservation clauses could be legitimately included in the event a big fish wants to sign up with a competitor.
Despite the pre-election considerations that undoubtedly influenced its timing and content, I say thumbs up to the WFW Act—even if it is a bit heavy on the fluff.
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