Toronto Employment and Labour Law Blog: Ten Critical Employment Issues Every Employer Must Face

Ten Critical Employment Issues Every Employer Must Face - #1 Equal Pay for Equal Work - 

Your client, ChildrenCo, makes some of the most successful toys for children in the world. Like most modern corporations, the ChildrenCo designs and distributes its products throughout North America.  Manufacturing is outsourced to entities overseas in third world countries.   Essentially, ChildrenCo’s business model is “toys for children made by children.”

In the fall, ChildrenCo’s distribution center becomes extremely busy as retailers stock up for the Christmas season.  To deal with this increased volume, ChildrenCo imports 50 or so local workers” from TemporaryOnly Co “TOC”.   TOC is a temporary help agency (THA).    ChildrenCo contracts with TOC to provide a parallel workforce to work the floor of the distribution and the loading docks alongside its full-time staff.   ChildrenCo also likes the fact that these workers are not its employees but that of TOC, TOC offers these workers at effectively 40% less than ChildrenCo’s regular, full-time employees.

However, the Fair Workplaces, Better Jobs Act, 2017 proposes legislation that would ensure Temporary Help Agency employees (assignment workers) are paid equally to permanent employees of the THA client when performing the same job.  The proposed changes would protect assignment employees from repercussions for inquiring about their wage rate or the wage rate of an employee of the client.  If the proposed legislation passes, this proposal would come into force on April 1, 2018.

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