The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many changes in the world of work.\u00a0 One of the most distinct is the great exodus that has occurred of employees moving from working at the business premises of the employer to their own residential homes.\u00a0 \u00a0The purpose of this blog is to inform our readers of what legal issues can occur with respect to this new shift to remote work or work-from-home arrangements.<\/p>\n
The Employment Standards Act\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Employment Standards Act<\/em>\u00a0applies with respect to work-from-home arrangements. In fact, work-from-home employees are actually a defined term under Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Employment Standards Act<\/em>.\u00a0 The Act defines these employees as \u201chomeworkers\u201d which means an individual who performs work for compensation in premises occupied by the individual primarily as residential quarters but does not include an independent contractor.\u00a0 Homeworkers are eligible for all the rights of employees who work at the business premises of the employer such as vacation pay, sick leave, overtime pay and notice of termination.\u00a0 \u00a0In fact, the minimum wage is set higher for homeworkers and sits at $15.40 per hour.\u00a0 \u00a0Minimum wage is simply the lowest amount per working hour that an employer can legally pay an employee in most jobs.<\/p>\n The Occupational Health and Safety Act\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Occupational Health and Safety Act<\/em>\u00a0requires that employers take certain precautions in order to protect its employees.\u00a0 The\u00a0Act<\/em>\u00a0further defines a \u201cworkplace\u201d as any land, premises, location or thing at, upon, in or near which a worker works.\u00a0 However, the\u00a0Act<\/em>\u00a0seemingly goes on to carve out work-from-home arrangements in section 3(1) of the\u00a0Act<\/em>, which sets out that the\u00a0Act<\/em>\u00a0does not apply to work performed by the owner or occupant or a servant of the owner or occupant to, in or about a private residence or the lands and appurtenances used in connection therewith. As such, Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Occupational Health and Safety Act<\/em>\u00a0probably does not apply to work-from-home arrangements.\u00a0 However, it does remain a bit unclear.<\/p>\n The Workplace Safety and Insurance Act<\/em><\/p>\n Interestingly, while Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Occupational Health and Safety Act<\/em>\u00a0seems to specifically carve out work-from-home arrangements, Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Workplace Safety and Insurance Act\u00a0<\/em>does not. In fact, this\u00a0Act<\/em>\u00a0directly applies to work-from-home arrangements.\u00a0 An employee may still file a claim with the WSIB even if that employee works from home as long as they were injured during the course of doing their job.\u00a0 Further, the WSIB sets out that it is still the employer\u2019s responsibility to look out for the health and safety of their employees regardless of whether or not the employee is under a work-from-home arrangement and fully expects the employer to report any workplace injuries or illnesses to the WISB.<\/p>\n The Human Rights Code\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Ontario\u2019s\u00a0Human Rights Code<\/em>\u00a0protects employees from discrimination regardless of where their workplace is located.\u00a0 To remind our readers, employers have a duty to accommodate employees to the point of undue hardship.\u00a0 With respect to the duty to accommodate within the work-from-home context there may be an increase in certain types of family status accommodation requests that may be unique to the COVID-19 pandemic.\u00a0 For instance, there may be an increase in concerns about the flexibility of working hours if the employee also has children at home because of school closures or childcare issues because of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n Privacy Concerns\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n There are going to be two issues here.\u00a0 The first is that employers are going to have concerns relating to employee productivity, which will cause them to try to implement certain technological systems to monitor their employees during the course of the workday.\u00a0 In response, employees will have legitimate concerns about their own privacy.\u00a0 However, whether or not they can do anything about it will remain to be seen.<\/p>\n Our Thoughts<\/em><\/p>\n Remote-work or work-from-home arrangements have seen a steady increase even in pre-pandemic times and technological advances have resulted in work facilitation opportunities that were unthinkable in the past. With the arrival of COVID-19, work-from-home arrangements have effectively become the norm in many industries, at least for now. In consequence, the definition of what constitutes a \u201cworkplace\u201d will continue to expand and attract to it commensurate rights and obligations both from employers and employees alike.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The COVID-19 pandemic has caused many changes in the world of work.\u00a0 One of the most distinct is the great exodus that has occurred of employees moving from working at the business premises of the employer to their own residential homes.\u00a0 \u00a0The purpose of this blog is to inform our readers of what legal issues […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":1936,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/work_from_home.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1625"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1625\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1625"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1625"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.zeilikmanlaw.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1625"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}