Comments on: Federal law “protects” employment for reservists but…

By: Ray K.

Ray K. — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 18:29:36 +0000

Rafael: “Who would honestly want to work for your company if you canâ€™t get sick, have kids, serve your country, or inconvenience you with a little thing called â€œlifeâ€?”

I am guessing people who are looking for “work” would.

By: skuleman

skuleman — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:13:18 +0000

Abbatoir,
I would tend to agree with you on protecting reservists, but the corollary is there should be some protection for small businesses similar to the protection given WRT jury duty.
Let me suggest a hypothetical example:
The owner of a small machine shop in a small town loses one of his 3 employees to the reserves, maternity or whatever. There aren’t any conveniently unemployed machinists in town just hankering for a “temporary” job.
So what does he do?
If he leaves the job vacant for a year, he loses the revenue on that machinists effort, but still covers the same shop overheads, and probably will lose customers permanently since he won’t be able to deliver on the same volume of work. Even then when the machinist returns, he may no longer have as much work any more so may have to lay someone off.
He could pay for a machinist to move to his small town, but that’s an unrecoverable expense, and if there’s inadequate work in town to grow his business what does he do with the new guy when the old one comes back to work
He could try to “steal” someone from a competitor if there’s one available, but the same issue as above comes into play when the original machinist comes back.
Both of the latter examples also leave him wide open to an improper dismissal suit unless he has in writing that the job was a temporary contract position. (and that may still not hold up in court, as there are already precedences where it hasn’t).
This leaves the owner between a rock and a hard place.

By: skuleman

skuleman — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 03:00:34 +0000

Well in some cases we did hire those people - i.e. the circumstance that drove our benefits package through the roof. I’m simply making the point that as we keep layering on these benefits they will make it impossible for small businesses to operate. When you have 100 staff, having to cover for one is a 1% increase in payroll cost. When you have 5 staff, covering for that one is a 20% increase. If your gross profit is only 10% it begs the question whether you can afford to stay in business.
In my comments:
“It also means that as a small business owner, when I look at hiring a woman of child-bearing age, someone with obvious medical issues, someone with children, and now a reservist, Iâ€™m have to consider that there are significant potential hidden costs in hiring that individual over alternative candidates.”
I postulated a hypothetical situation, not one, luckily, that I had to face. I have however on several occasions had to deal with sorting through large numbers of resumes in order to hire someone. As anyone who does that will admit, you don’t interview 100 people when you get a 100 resumes. You pare the list down to a manageable few. You reject resumes because they’re not typed, have spelling errors, are too long or too short, don’t list academic qualifications etc. But the reality is, you consider whether potential candidates might be a liability or an asset to the organization, and in a small business making a mistake can mean losing your company, your home, your livelihood etc.

By: Raphael Alexander

Raphael Alexander — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:07:12 +0000

skuleman, those risky people are what make Canada great, not your small business. Who would honestly want to work for your company if you can’t get sick, have kids, serve your country, or inconvenience you with a little thing called “life”?

By: Abattoir

Abattoir — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:49:58 +0000

Skuleman,
Your own question about hiring them and offering them less salary shows that you admit to contravening the Charter in your employment decisions. Everyone has to play by the same rules, so if the only way your company can survive is by breaking the rules, I’m afraid your company deserves to go out of business.

Society decides its own rules. Sometimes we decide things that are good for business, sometimes we have the greater good in mind. Personally, I would support any move to protect reservists jobs in all sectors while they are deployed.

This is already law in the US, and their reserves are far larger than our entire military. Their business sector seems to have survived.

By: skuleman

skuleman — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 13:14:31 +0000

I used to have a small staff (maxed at 10) and if we had had to implement this it could have bankrupted the company. Governments don’t realize the impact these kind of policies have on small businesses. As an example, when we first hired an employee with children, the increase in our health plan for 10 people doubled because of that one employee and the dental coverage. We ended up killing the benefits plan because we couldn’t afford it.
Whether its military service, maternity, extended medical leave or whatever a small business takes a proportionately larger hit to provide these benefits.
When you have to backfill a skilled worker for 6 months or a year, its almost impossible. You can’t get skilled people if you hire them with the proviso you’re going to dump them when the person they’re replacing comes back. You can’t hire them as a permanent employee (which is kind of a lie) and then fire them because you then have to deal with improper dismissal/severance (another disproportionate cost), and you can’t leave the position empty and ask the rest of the staff to cover the shortfall with overtime, at least, not if you want to fulfill your contract commitments.
This leaves small businesses (of which there a 1 million in Canada) between a rock and a hard place. It also means that as a small business owner, when I look at hiring a woman of child-bearing age, someone with obvious medical issues, someone with children, and now a reservist, I’m have to consider that there are significant potential hidden costs in hiring that individual over alternative candidates. So, do I hire those people and try to offer them 20-30% less salary to cover that risk, or do I ignore them for a less “risky” candidate.
Just to put this in perspective, in my current business model I don’t have staff, but in my previous one I was hiring computer programmers. When we went looking for someone it was not uncommon to get 100+ resumes, so I was never in a position of not being able to find someone qualified who wasn’t in a “high-risk” group.

By: mth

mth — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 12:33:38 +0000

The real problem with all of this is that the power to regulate terms of employment in the private sector prinicpally lies with the Provinces and typically getting most of them to do anything, even if it is the right thing, usually requires backing up the truck and unloading piles of money.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 03:00:18 +0000

“If this future law â€” the product of perceived positive signals â€” demands that a private sector job be held for a reservist without some form of compensation to the employer, MacKay is being disingenuous.”

Aren’t you getting a little ahead of yourself (and the issue) here? They are not proposing to introduce legislation targeting the private sector. Rather, you seem to be doin’ some signal reading of your own. Let me join you for a sec - MacKay could be signalling that the private sector is signalling to him that they are interested in protecting the jobs of reservists on their own - without federal legislation.

The thing to remember about the public service environment is that this kind of legislation is required in order to put such a practice in place. Is it a preview of the approach that the federal government will take with the private sector? I don’t think so, but we’ll see.