An employer’s decision to lay off and then terminate a worker after telling her she would have an ongoing role in a restructuring was a reprisal for a harassment complaint, the Ontario Labour Relations Board has ruled.
If the worker was going to be laid off, then there shouldn’t have been any discussions with her, because then the employer had the obligation to show that the layoff had no correlation to her harassment complaint,” says Chantel Goldsmith, an employment and labour lawyer at Samfiru Tumarkin in Ottawa and Toronto.
“And because they weren’t able to demonstrate that effectively, that’s when it ended up being considered a reprisal.”
