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BlackBerry Sued By Over 300 Former Employees (mobilesyrup.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: BlackBerry is facing a class-action lawsuit from more than 300 former employees across Canada, according to a news release from law firm Nelligan O'Brien Payne LLP. The Waterloo, Ontario-based tech company is accused of denying employees their termination entitlements by transferring them to a partner company and, once they had accepted employment there, handed them resignation letters. The former employees were then allegedly given their final date of work. "BlackBerry's actions amount to a termination of the employees' employment," the law firm said. "This entitles these employees to statutory, common law, and/or contractual entitlements on termination."
As described the events were undertaken to reduce the class of employees' time at their employer to 0 in a fairly blatant attempt to do an end run around Canadian Labor laws with respect to severance based on time at Blackberry. See constructive dismissal.
Sharp Practice.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
And get it booked as legal settlement instead of wages...
Sharp Practice.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
h1b is a US thing. we are talking about canada, you hoser.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
h1b is a US thing. we are talking about canada, you hoser.
Yes, but Canada has something similar where it is called "H-1B-eh?".
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"Blackberry provided resignation letters for the employees to sign and dictated their last date of employment."
Blackberry pointed guns at the employees' heads and told them that either their signatures or their brains would be on the letters.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
"once they had accepted employment there, handed them resignation letters"
Isn't resignation something the employee hands to the employer, not the other way around? Am I missing something here, or is this just shoddy journalism?
It's sort of a "you're fired, here's your resignation letter."
It seems to be implied that there were termination benefits (Severance package) at both companies, Blackberry and also the 2nd company. By signing the resignation letters at the 2nd company they may have been bribed by some kind of severance package that is much less than what they would have got from BB.
If they refused to sign the letter they got nothing. Thus the agreement to sign a resignation letter they didn't write.
By transferring them to the second company it relieves BB from the obligations of the (assumed) much larger BB severance package.
Dirty underhanded shenanigans either way. Thus the lawsuit that I presume BB will lose.
Flappinbooger isn't my real name
It boggles my mind to think that somewhere there is a upper management or C-suite executive that hatched and implemented this scheme and went home that day thinking 'job well done'. I wonder if his wife and kids are proud of him.
Actually I think this type of behavior probably is done by groups of people (committees, boards, etc) where they can feel like it's OK - as long as nobody disagrees, everyone else is OK with it too, so it can't be THAT bad.
this is not about legal termination, this is about the company trying to pull a fast one in order to get out of paying severance pay BECAUSE they didnt have a legal reason to fire them but they didnt want to have to pay the amount that they are legally obligated to pay.Otherwise they would have justly terminated the employees with cause (and proper documentation)
Why are these laws so important? because they promote job security and job security is good for the economy.
Where do you work? would you be ok with your employer coming up to you and for no reason telling you to clean out your desk and get out? would you be ok with not getting any compensation at all, just told to GTFO?
they are not special little snowflakes as you so put it, they are the ones making sure that the company that you work for cant just do this to you. so, maybe they are better than you because they chose to fight rather than roll over for their corporate overlords.
Wrong: Work laws ensure guarantees and benefits for employees given their time on the company, such as how much you get in a severance package, how many days of vacations and so on. Since the "transfer" is made by making them sign a RESIGNATION it makes them thus resign to their law-granted benefits from their years in Blackberry. This means, for example, that if they were then fired from the partner company a few months later their severance package would be near naught, compared to the package they would get from being fired in Blackberry after their years of work.
This is in Ontario Canada. This is most definitely not an "at-will" jurisdiction when it comes to employment.
The Ontario Labour Relations Act applies, along with common law. (The entitlements written down are not what applies -- it is what is "usual and customary" that applies in Ontario for severance compensation -- and that is *much* more generous than what is written in the legislation.)
Anyone subject to severance (of any kind) in Ontario should consult with a lawyer experienced with the practice of employment law in Ontario before signing anything.
Ian Ameline
Termination being acceptable by either party for any legal reason... why do these special snowflakes think they are better than the rest of us?
That shit stayed south of the border in the USA.
And asserting your legal rights isn't being a special snowflake; crying on message boards about people asserting their legal rights is being a special snowflake.
Blackberry reported $2.38 billion in cash reserves for fiscal 2016. They might be hemorrhaging money, but they could have afforded the severance for 300 employees.
Termination being acceptable by either party for any legal reason... why do these special snowflakes think they are better than the rest of us?
The practice is completely illegal in the United States because of labor laws. You can certainly get rid of people, but you can't transfer them to a subsidiary to do it, that's considered Unemployment Insurance fraud. Companies pay UI tax based on their history of employment and layoffs, and benefits are based on the amount of time people worked at the company. When you transfer people to another company before getting rid of them, it hides your real employment figures and that of the employees, fraudulently providing yourself a tax benefit.
I don't know what the system is like in Canada, but in the US they would be civilly AND criminally liable based on Federal law and state statutes.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
In Canadian Labour law there's the notion of "constructive dismissal" (I'm sure there must be similar principles in the US), wherein an employer creates conditions in which an employee is effectively terminated, without an actual notice of layoff or termination. The classic example is reducing an employee's hours to or near 0. In most jurisdictions in Canada, "constructive dismissal" is viewed as a termination, and when that happens, no notice has been given commensurate with the employee's length of time working for the company, and that employee is due severance. Such actions also can cause serious with an employee being able to receive unemployment benefits, as the employee does not receive a "Record of Employment" showing the number of hours he worked.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I don't think BB would have violated any Federal laws up here, but they most certainly violated Ontario labor law. This is a classic case of constructive dismissal. Transferring employees to a subsidiary does not abrogate any legal or contractual obligations BB has to those employees, and since it's clear the intent here was to get them off of BB's books and then throw them out the door, that will make the constructive dismissal claims by the employees all the stronger.
My totally non-legal advice to BB is get out the checkbook, because they do not want a judge to make the finding and come up with the employees' award.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Yeah in Canada they're called TFW's(temporary foreign workers), and unlike H1B's a TFW can replace any job at any level if the company can work out a way to claim there isn't someone to fill it. The Royal Bank of Canada was caught doing this a few years ago. But it's happened across skilled trades, white collar workers, blue collar, take your pick.
Om, nomnomnom...
Article is intentionally misleading. It's not outright false, but it's written so that a casual reader will think this happened:
Blackberry transfers employees to sham company.
Sham company (Blackberry) fires workers.
What happened is that
Blackberry transfers employees to Ford motor company of Canada.
Blackberry informs employees (after arranging the transfer) that the years of service do not transfer over, and they don't get any severance.
Still seems scummy, but not the same level of scummy.