The Chartwell Chronicles: Employment Law
Managing the Size and Structure of Your Post-Pandemic Workforce
#WorkforceWednesday: OSHA ETS on Hold, Retaliation Claims Increase, "Vaccination Ambassadors" - Employment Law This Week®
The COVID-19 litigation lag continues to play out in Canadian courts; and employers are starting to get some clarity on some of the key workplace issues that arose during the pandemic. In Clark v. City of Prince George,...more
In Croke v. VuPoint System Ltd., 2024 ONCA 354, the Court of Appeal for Ontario (OCA) upheld the Superior Court of Justice – Ontario (SCJ)’s summary judgment decision that an employee’s refusal to comply with their employer’s...more
The Ontario Court of Appeal recently held that an employee’s failure to meet COVID-19 vaccination requirements imposed by a third party amounted to frustration of the employment contract. As a result, there was no obligation...more
In Aldergrove Duty Free Shop Ltd. v. MacCallum, 2024 BCCA 28, the Court of Appeal for British Columbia (BCCA) dismissed an employer’s appeal when it agreed with the lower court that the employer could not use the frustration...more
In wrongful termination cases in the U.S., the primary source of liability for employers is an employee’s alleged lost wages. Under U.S. law, an employee who is terminated for a discriminatory or a retaliatory reason is...more
Litigation over employment issues relating to the COVID-19 pandemic is finally reaching the trial and appellate courts. This week, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed dismissal of a lawsuit from a warehouse manager...more
An arbitrator recently issued the first award in Ontario to address and uphold the reasonableness of a hospital vaccination policy that provides for the termination of employment for non-compliance. In Lakeridge Health and...more
Along with the increasing number of remote work arrangements available to employees in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic has come an exponential rise in employers’ use of employee monitoring technology. Nearly 80% of major...more
On October 29, 2021, in Blake v. University Health Network, 2021 ONSC 7139 (Blake), the Ontario Superior Court of Justice discontinued an interim injunction that it had issued on October 22, 2021, staying the terminations of...more
In Kraft v. Firepower Financial Corp., 2021 ONSC 4962 (Firepower Financial), an employee brought a motion for summary judgment seeking 10 months’ salary in lieu of notice, commissions and bonuses, and holiday and vacation pay...more
COVID-19- automatic unfair dismissal for employee who remained in Italy during outbreak - A Tribunal has found, in the case of Montanaro v Lansafe Limited, that an employee who had travelled from the UK to Italy for the...more
Similar to 2019, in 2021, the Nevada Legislature passed several bills implicating employment issues for both private and public employers. High level summaries of the relevant provisions of these bills and their effective...more
In the first ruling of its kind nationwide, a federal court in Texas has upheld a hospital’s policy requiring employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of continued employment... ...more
Seyfarth Synopsis: In a recent case out of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, the Court dismissed wrongful termination and violation of public policy claims brought by employees refusing an employer’s...more
On June 12, 2021, a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas dismissed a case filed by 116 hospital employees who challenged Houston Methodist Hospital’s (the “Hospital”) mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy. Jennifer...more
On April 1, 2021, Houston Methodist Hospital announced that all of its employees would be required to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by June 7, 2021, but that it would provide accommodations to any employee with disability...more
UPDATE: On June 12, 2021, the hospital’s motion to dismiss this lawsuit in its entirety was granted. The Court found that the hospital’s policy of mandating the COVID-19 vaccine aligned with its business of saving lives...more
A federal judge in Texas on June 12, 2021 dismissed a lawsuit brought by Texas health care workers challenging their hospital’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. The scathing opinion by U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes left no...more
Concluding that a highly publicized lawsuit challenging Houston Methodist Hospital’s mandatory vaccination policy failed to state viable legal claims and misrepresented certain facts, federal Judge Lynn Hughes dismissed the...more
To date, few decisions in Canada have considered whether the amount of the Canadian Emergency Response Benefit (CERB) employees receive after their job termination should be deducted from their damages in lieu of common law...more
Despite widespread vaccine availability and the corresponding optimism about returning to “normal,” the coronavirus pandemic continues to spawn hundreds of employment and health-related lawsuits. Many of these lawsuits have...more
Fisher Phillips’ COVID-19 Employment Litigation Tracker continues to report that the healthcare industry is the hardest hit by COVID-19 employment litigation. As of the beginning of June, more than one in five of every...more
On May 28, 2021, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (“EEOC”) issued updated guidance regarding workplace COVID-19 vaccination policies and employee accommodations (the “Updated Guidance”). Among other issues, the...more
On May 28, 2021, 117 unvaccinated nonmanagerial employees from Houston Methodist Hospital filed a lawsuit to challenge the hospital’s vaccine mandate in Jennifer Bridges et al. v The Methodist Hospital. This appears to be the...more