“An employee is obligated to accept comparable employment if it comes their way during the common law notice period – and that doesn’t mean exactly identical employment, it means comparable with the wages, the duties, and the responsibilities being similar, if not exactly the same.”
So says Madeleine Loewenberg, an employment lawyer, workplace investigator, and mediator at Loewenberg Psarris in Toronto, after an Ontario court dismissed a worker’s wrongful dismissal suit because the worker failed to accept an offer for a similar job that would have started shortly after her termination.
The worker, 60, was hired by Kinsdale Carriers, a trucking company in Woodstock, Ont., in the position of office personnel/accounts receivable in July 1998. Her duties included creating invoices and making deposits, filing, creating monthly reports, packaging and mailing orders, inventory counts, and completing weekly driver pay settlements.