Can an employee be penalized for missing work due to medical appointment? Can an employer discipline an employee for taking time off work for a medical appointment? What if the employee is still on the probation period? I won't get into specific details, but a somewhat urgent need for me to see a specialist came up and the soonest appointment he has conflicts with my work schedule. The manager is saying he cannot change the schedule.
BC employers are required to give workers three days of unpaid personal illness &amp; injury leave per calendar year. However, this protection only applies to workers who have held a job for more than 90 days. If you have not held the job for that long, it does not appear that any protections apply to you. Note that (as of March 2021) there are separate rules concerning COVID-19 exposure &amp; illness. There may also be protections that apply to you if you are a union member, or if you work in a federally regulated job (banks, national trucking companies, airlines, and some others.)
It is not illegal to treat the employees differently. As long as nobody is being paid for less than the time worked, this is legal. Treating employees differently because of protected characteristics is unlawful discrimination. However, the duration you have worked there is not a protected characteristic. It is perfectly legal for the employer not to mandate new employees clock in and out. It would even be legal (if not a great idea) to hire new employees for twice as much.
Provincial jurisdiction may need to be specified. But in general, assuming you are not covered by a collective bargaining agreement, you can be terminated for any reason or even no reason, as long as the contract is followed, the actual or apparent reason is not discriminatory or otherwise illegal and the termination procedure meets the provincial employment standards. The labour law usually provide requirements for notice periods or severance pay (or both), unless there exists a just cause (e.g. extreme disregard of duty, theft, repeated insubordination, etc.; lack of funds on the part of the employer is not a just cause). shouldn't the employer be fully responsible for the salary coverage of his employee in the course of his contract? Yes, but the contract is saying it can be terminated under certain conditions, after which time you are no longer &quot;in the course&quot; of your contract. Termination due to lack of funds is usually not considered discriminatory or otherwise illegal. You remain entitled to wages for any period you have worked. Additionally, the employer needs to respect the required notice period or severance pay under the provincial employment standards related to termination with or without cause, regardless of the funding situation.
A company had me sign two conflicting documents about two years apart. Which one would apply? Possibly both because actually there is no conflict. What you describe does not reflect that these documents are incompatible or inconsistent. There is no indication that the second document impliedly or explicitly replaces the first one. The second document seems just redundant so far. Employees could likewise be required to sign a third document that only says &quot;no drugs or alcohol on the job site on Wednesdays&quot;, and that does not mean that any previous documents they signed expire.
You identify basically two issues. Non-Responsiveness and Failing To Meet Deadlines One is that he's taking longer than planned to get your work done, and might have abandoned you. The sad but true reality is that lawyers frequently do get busy and sometimes fail to meet the deadlines that they have set for themselves. In this respect, the legal industry is a lot like the construction industry. Lawyers try to meet deadlines on time, and usually they do, but it isn't unusual at all for a lawyer to fall behind schedule in some of his cases. In part, this is because lawyers have little control over their own schedules because things can come up that suddenly require their total attention and get them off track on a regular basis. Sometimes, they have trouble getting back into the flow of work that they were before the interruption came up. Can I do anything else now? In that case, usually your best solution is to nag the lawyer regularly even to the extent that it is a little bit uncomfortable, but to demonstrate no hard feelings when he turns his attention back to your project. But, if he just totally abandons you, you need to find someone else to do the work and fire him. If he never contacts me and I find out next year that someone is doing exactly the same thing, can I sue him for the money I lost for not being able to complete this business? Realistically no. If he blows you off entirely you need to fire him and find someone else to do the work. You are very unlikely to be able to win compensation for him delaying the start of your business. These damages would usually be considered &quot;too speculative&quot; to allow for a recovery in a case like this one. Does he have some responsibility to do the work that we agreed to, or can he somehow talk his way out of it? He does have some responsibility to do the work. If he doesn't he has breached his contract with you and may owe you a refund of your fees. Truly abandoning a client and neglecting his or her case is also a violation of professional ethics. This is a pretty minor offense compared to the offenses involving idea theft if it happens in isolation, which might result in a minor slap on the wrist like a private reprimand that would be held against him if incidents like this surfaced again in the future. But, this routinely leads to an attorney being disbarred (often on an uncontested basis) if an attorney one day just stops working for almost all of his clients and walks away from his practice (often due to a psychological breakdown, despondency after a divorce or an affair, dementia, untreated mental health conditions, a personal tragedy in life such as the death of a spouse or a child, or substance abuse). There is a small but persistent trickle of cases with that fact pattern. It is hard to know from the perspective of an individual client if he just got busy and overlooked a case or two including yours, or if he totally shut down or walked away from most of his practice. Can I get a court order requiring him to do the things he offered to do in the email that I agreed to, for the price we agreed to? No. You can sue for the money damages you suffer from his breach of contract (but probably not speculative lost profits), but you can't get a court order forcing him to do what he promised to do (among other things, it would violate the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution for a court to do that). Idea Theft The second issue is what happens if your lawyer steals your ideas. Regardless, I'd like to know what I can do if he does not complete the work and starts a company that does the same as what I had planned to do. This is very unlikely and a very unwise choice for the lawyer. An Analogy In terms of likelihood and severity of consequences if a lawyer does so, this would be on a par with a lawyer beating up his client severely with a baseball bat. Beating up a client physically is a type of lawyer misconduct that is very infrequent, but isn't entirely non-existent (for what it is worth, most of the rare cases of physical assaults by lawyers on their clients seem to take place in Kentucky or Texas; physical assaults by clients on their lawyers, in contrast, are thousands of times more frequent and happen all over the United States). But, it is punished very severely when it happens (even though there isn't a rule of professional conduct for lawyers that prohibits this kind of misconduct by lawyers with great specificity). Civil Liability He would have legal liability to you for breach of fiduciary duty probably requiring him, among other things, to disgorge all of his profits to you and pay you for any lost profits you could demonstrate (which might be less speculative if his business didn't fail). He could also face civil liability including statutory damages or punitive damages for theft of trade secrets. Suspension or Loss Of A Law License He would probably also face a very high risk of being suspended from the practice of law for a prolonged period, or being disbarred if you complained to attorney regulatory authorities. Attorneys have ethical rules related to confidentiality and related to business ventures or making profits that involve clients or client information that are very strict and are taken seriously by lawyers. If he were caught breaching these obligations the consequences would be harsh for him. Criminal Law Consequences He could even face a criminal prosecution for theft of trade secrets under either state or federal law. I wouldn't be very surprised at all if criminal charges would be brought in a case like the one that you are worried about. The closest analogy (which is much more common) is when an attorney pockets money from the sale of client property instead of turning it over to a client. Those cases routinely result in significant prison sentences for the perpetrator. For example, I have a client whose former attorney was convicted and sentenced to about eight years in federal prison for stealing about $600,000 of proceeds from the sale of client property. These cases are much more common because a lawyer under extreme financial pressure can have a one time impulsive lapse and temporarily solve the problem created by the financial pressure. But, in this case, the lawyer needs to engage in years of sustained, publicly visible activity based upon the misconduct that is unlikely to produce huge sums of money right away and might even require an additional investment on his part, not a single, quick, lapse of judgment after which the wrongdoing is over and the impulsive need is met. This Almost Never Happens A busy lawyer with a successful specialized practice would very rarely risk those kinds of consequences when he already has a successful enterprise practicing law. A &quot;typical&quot; case where that might happen would involve someone whose family members were kidnapped and facing imminent death if he didn't comply by a foreign government trying to steal military secrets or a drug cartel. This isn't something that a lawyer would do out of mere greed. Lawyers with the kind of sophisticated tech industry legal practice that you describe often invest in their clients' businesses in ways that strictly comply with the relevant ethical rules (which the scenario that you are worried about would not). Sometimes lawyers get in trouble when they substantially comply with the rules but don't do so strictly (e.g. providing fully disclosure and consent but not getting it in writing). But, I can only think of a single case in twenty years or so of practicing law where I've ever seen even an accusation of something like what you are worried about happen, and I've never seen a case like that in case law reports, or news coverage in either the popular press, or trade journals. The case where I did see that accusation wasn't entirely implausible, but it wasn't an entirely clear case of misappropriation either, and the client making the accusation, realistically would have been hard pressed to have made the business idea allegedly stolen work himself. Theft of business plans isn't all that uncommon in and of itself, but an attorney for the person whose plans are stolen is very uncommon as a perpetrator. Far more often it is another business person who had some minor or major involvement with the tech venture, or someone to whom the venture was pitched. This is the sort of thing that venture capital guys and start up company executives with little money of their own in the venture usually do, not the tech firm's own lawyers, in most cases. The kind of betrayal that you are worried about would be extremely unusual conduct for a lawyer in this situation. It would be almost as uncommon as a criminal defense lawyer engaging in sustained leaking of incriminating privileged evidence to prosecutors in a death penalty murder case. Either kind of betrayal isn't impossible, but it just almost never happens that way, even though lawyers commit all sorts of other kinds of misconduct now and then, and that sometimes hurts clients badly. Clients are much more often harmed by neglect and incompetence than by such a direct betrayal from their lawyers. Proving Misconduct Would it matter whether I could connect him to that copycat company? Yes, it would matter. You wouldn't necessarily have to show that he was being compensated by the company, but you would have to show that he was, at a minimum, helping another client with information obtained from you, either in his capacity as their lawyer or as someone involved in their business in some other way. If a copycat business appears that you can't demonstrate has any connection to him of any kind, then you have no way to prove that he did anything wrong. Not infrequently, great minds think alike and someone comes up with a very similar idea to yours, independently, at about the same time that you do.
Raise the question with your employer If you believe that you are an employee and not a contractor then there is presumably something you want from your employer. This may be additional wages and entitlements that you would have or will become entitled to for past or future work respectively. Or you may have been injured and want workers' compensation. Or terminated and you want redundancy pay. Whatever it is, work it out and raise the issue with your employer. You might want to consult an accountant or union to help you. They may acknowledge that you were incorrectly classified and give you what you want. Winner, winner, chicken dinner! Or they may dispute it. If so, you need to follow the dispute resolution processes at your workplace. These typically involve informal discussions, escalating to mediation and then to a workplace tribunal run by the government. You will almost certainly want to consult a lawyer or union to help you - given that you don't know where to start the learning curve is likely to be too steep. In virtually every jurisdiction if people are employees at law they can't choose not to be. in british-columbia the relevant law appears to be the Employment Standards Act although it's not unheard of in edge cases for a person to be an employee under one law (e.g. workers' compensation) and a contractor under another (e.g. income tax). From the linked site: The overriding question is “whose business is it?” Is the person who is doing the work doing it as a person in business for themselves? If you are working "for" your own business you are probably a contractor. If you are working "for" your employer's business you are probably an employee. For example, if you are an accountant with several dozen clients, maintain your own business premises and charge for your advice based on the amount quoted rather than by the hour, you're a contractor. If instead, you have 2 clients, work from their premises at set hours and get paid by the day or week, you're an employee with 2 jobs. In edge cases these are not cut and dried - Google are Uber driver's employees. In Australia: no. In California: yes. In the UK: yes.
A company can mandate getting a flu shot as a condition of employment. The government can do the same (for its employees) – Washington state has done so at least for covid. Some individuals qualify for a disability accommodation, so they would be exceptions (e.g. they could be moved to working away from the public). A sincere religious conviction also gives rise to a religious-accommodation exemption. This guidance addresses the question of what constitutes a sincerely held religious belief.
Would breaking a rule in the handbook constitute breach of contract? Generally speaking, yes. Of course, most employment contracts are "at will" so a breach of contract often isn't necessary to terminate employment. Does my employer's updating the handbook constitute a unilateral change of contract? It depends upon what is changed in the update to the handbook. Typically an employment contract would have a term that says something to the effect of "employee shall devote his full time effort to perform the duties he is directed to perform by employer in a satisfactory manner." If the employee handbook says, "part of every employee's duties includes cleaning up his work area at the close of business each day, locking his file cabinets and shutting down his computer", this would typically simply be a definition of the duties of the employee which the employer reserved the right to change in the original employment contract, and not a unilateral change of contract. On the other hand, if the employee handbook says, "vacation days may not be taken during December" when the employee's contract simply said that "you have ten vacation days per year", that might constitute a unilateral change of contract which might not be enforceable for an employee with a fixed term of employment who was not an employee at will, without additional consideration. Locale is UK but (I assume) contract law is pretty universal so answers specific to any region are welcome. I have answered based upon general contract and employment law, but the UK frequently sets mandatory standards for different kinds of contracts and modifies common law rules related to contracts (much more so than the U.S.), so it wouldn't be very surprising if this were modified by a statute of which I am not aware. We have UK lawyers who contribute to Law.SE and they can chime in if there are particular statutes in the UK that apply to this question.