Hundreds of longtime Rogers employees claim they’re being told to choose: take a new job with Ericsson — or walk away.
That’s according to law firm Samfiru Tumarkin LLP, representing some of the affected workers. The firm says Rogers has sold off part of its wireless services support department to Ericsson, and roughly 400 employees are caught in the middle.
Remember the massive nationwide Rogers outage in 2021? Rogers said the outage was blamed on an Ericsson software update.
“Rogers can’t treat its employees like inventory being transferred in a business deal. One individual told us they were given an ultimatum: ‘join Ericsson or quit.’ These are people, not property,” Lior Samfiru, employment lawyer and co-founding partner of Samfiru Tumarkin LLP, said on Wednesday.
“If an employee doesn’t want to work for Ericsson, they can’t be forced to quit. Rogers has to let them go with full severance pay — not the minimum amount. This is especially true if the terms of employment offered by Ericsson aren’t the same as what these employees received with Rogers, which we’re being told includes a termination clause. That’s a textbook case of wrongful dismissal,” said Samfiru.
Under Canadian employment law, if a business is sold and the buyer doesn’t keep certain workers, the original employer is still responsible for severance pay.
This comes after Rogers offered voluntary severance packages to some staff following its merger with Shaw. Other telecom companies, including Bell and Telus, have also offered severance and early retirement options to customer support employees in recent months, as part of job cuts.
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Unfair likely, unlawful likely not. This is not the first time a company sell off a part of its operations. People usually get fired, maybe be glad you were given a choice?
Not even the first time Rogers has outsourced one of their teams. Back in 2008 or 2009 they outsourced almost the entirety of their Shared Services (Shared Operations? It's been a long time) team to IBM. That withstood a legal challenge, and this will, too, as long as the offered "new position" is a "close enough" match (similar salary, vacation time, and benefits).
But isn't the issue here that Rogers didn't want to fire them legitimately and instead wanted them to leave on their own? Maybe the choice some wanted was to be fired, and Rogers is trying to find ways around the obligations attached to that while still getting rid of them.
There's no such thing as "fair" today..
Yes, there is. As in ‘fair weather’
Similar thing happened to people I know in a totally unrelated industry. They were told either move to new company or be fired with minumum severance. Their "normal" severance would be years worked = months paid out, which would be over a year for some (10+ years) if they get fired in a "normal" way.
There is a difference between what they were told and what the law says. Employers would try to pull it off knowing it is not legal, so if it works for them – great. Not much to loose if they try, counting that not every employee would take a legal action. But if it gets to the courts, most would rule according to the existing laws and for the wrongfully dismissed employees.
All too common these days, because there's no consequences. People living paycheque to paycheque can't afford to lawyer up and corporate HR squads know it.
Obviously in the wireless side as Rogers doesn't use Ericsson on the wireline side