Lawyer points to importance of notice period in making the move
Employers looking to call workers back to the office should take a closer look at the legal issues surrounding this move, according to a lawyer.
This is something that employers just can’t drop on their workers out of the blue, said Jon Pinkus, a labour and employment lawyer with Samfiru Tumarkin, in a CTV News report.
For one, for people hired as remote workers and who have been working remotely for the past few years, “that’s become a term of your employment,” he said. This means employers can’t just force them to be in the office.
This applies even to those who were hired during the pandemic, he said.
Some workers have vowed to quit if they are required to report in the office, according to a previous report.
How do you tell staff to return to office?
However, for those who have reported in the office before the pandemic and were forced to go remote during the health crisis, things are a bit more complicated. And one crucial factor is the time of notice, and those that did not do so in the past year may have missed their window, he said.
“The time to set parameters was in 2020 and 2021, where it could be conveyed to those employees that look, we may be continuing this into 2023, but this is ultimately a temporary arrangement, and we expect we're going to bring you back in as soon as circumstances allow,” Pinkus told CTV News.
Had employers done that, employees cannot escape from returning to the workplace should their company decide to call them back, he said.
In Canada, workers are already reporting in the office about three times each week, according to a report from JLL released in December 2023.
‘Indefinite arrangement’ of remote work
However, if employers did not give the necessary notice early enough, and if employees who went remote in 2020 were still working remotely after the World Health Organization removed its state of emergency declaration for COVID-19 in the spring of 2023, “it starts to look like an indefinite arrangement,” said Pinkus in the CTV article
“And once an employee has an indefinite arrangement, whether that be they're working in a certain location, or they're working from home, they're entitled to have that continued,” he said.
In that case, employers asking workers to return to the office “could be seen as a fundamental change that the employee could decline”.
And if an employer fires a worker for not following its return-to-office mandate, the worker can argue that the firing was without cause and that they are entitled to compensation, said Pinkus in the CTV article.
“I think the only solution available with respect to employees who are not agreeable to going back into the office is to give them advance notice. And potentially significant advance notice of that change.”
Requiring in-office attendance is raising human rights issues, according to a previous report.
