London Inc. June 2022 - 21

Dewar observes.
But Covid changed that. Nobody had
really been planning for a pandemic,
even if pandemics are a regular enough
feature of human life (long memories
and worst-case scenario planning, on
the other hand, are not).
The main questions now, says Dewar,
centre on what the modern workplace
should look like and how it should
operate. Remote work means employees
are often spread across different
jurisdictions, with slightly different
labour laws. We're also in an extremely
tight labour market, where workers
have access to - and are using - new
types of leverage that didn't exist in the
labour market of the last few decades.
For example, if a company wants to
 : Lawyers Matt Dewar, Jason Beeho and Michael Lee of Duntrune Law
bring their workers back to the office,
how should they respond to the holdouts?
What if, Dewar hypothesizes, a
company " really wants to hire this new
person, they're the perfect candidate,
Just as that was happening, the government rolled
out expansive aid programs, like CERB and CEWS,
complicating things further. " We almost thought
we were back in law school, looking up all these new
programs, " jokes Dewar.
Then came vaccinations. " Vaccine policies, people
refusing to get vaccinated - employers wanted to know
if they could fire people or not, or if they could put them
on unpaid leave, " says Dewar. " It shifted so quickly. "
Vaccines were a tricky, controversial and sensitive
issue, especially as the science around variants, boosters
and efficacy evolved on the fly, he says - like building the
proverbial airplane while it's in mid-flight.
And now, the third stage, where lawyers try to figure
out how to make sense of legal obligations in a changed
world.
" The third stage - what we're in now - is the lawsuits, "
Dewar says. People who had been laid off are now
trying to sort out what kind of severance they're owed, or
if that layoff amounts to a constructive dismissal.
And then there's hybrid and remote work to think
about - and what about future waves? Masks? Boosters?
Paid sick days? The list goes on, and without a clear and
unambiguous legal path forward on all of it, it gets left to
law firms like Duntrune, and lawyers like Dewar, to sort
it out as best they can.
" We're the lucky inheritors of 850 years of
jurisprudence, where everything has been built on the
day before and the day before that, and you have that
ability to look back on what smarter people have said, "
but one of their absolute no-bend rules is that they want
to work three days at home? "
Or, what if the lone holdout is " that person who has
been with you for 25 years, knows all the ins and outs
and has tons of institutional knowledge? "
For Dewar, it means we are entering a new era where
trust between employer and employee is more important
than ever, and where that trust will need to be rebuilt
over time.
" HOLY SMOKES, NOBODY SAW IT
COMING. AND WHEN IT CAME
FOR EMPLOYMENT LAWYERS, IT
CAME HARD AND FAST "
-Matt Dewar
" A lot of the questions revolve around trust, " he says.
" As always, the most important asset that an employer
has are its employees and you need to look at each
individual case; you can't operate in a vacuum, you have
to take a contextual approach. "
As Dewar suggests, there's no one size fits all. But out
of the back-and-forth may come clarity - and a renewed
social contract as it relates to work.
" There's going to be more tension coming, " he says.
" But I think we're going to see all new things. "
DELAMONT
KIERAN
JUNE 2022 | londonincmagazine.ca | 21

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London Inc. June 2022

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