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A steaming pile of bullshit.
Jul. 5th, 2010 09:45 amI'm not even talking about waking up after only five hours of sleep to find my kitchen ceiling leaking (though that is also bullshit).
No, today I'm talking about my province's ridiculous labour laws.
We actually have some truly shitty labour laws in New Brunswick. But the one I'm really steamed about now is that it's technically legal in New Brunswick to have a person work 7 days a week, each and every week.
Here, it's the law to give a person 1 day off per week. That isn't a calendar day, though. That's just a single 24-hour period. Which means that a person can legally have a schedule that looks like the following:
Mon: 11 AM - 5 PM
Tues: 5 PM - 9 PM
Wed: 11 AM - 5 PM
Thurs: 11 AM - 5 PM
Fri: 11 AM - 5 PM
Sat: 11 AM - 5 PM
Sun: 11 AM - 5 PM
That gap between finishing work on Monday at 5 and starting the next shift at 5 the next day counts as a person's "day off."
And such a schedule wouldn't even put somebody over the 44 hours a week needed to get overtime, either.
Not sure if that's legal in every province. But the fact that it's legal at all anywhere here is a load of bullshit.
What surprises me is that more unscrupulous businesses don't take advantage of this. People would complain, but legally they'd have no recourse.
Never mind that such a schedule would be very physically and emotionally draining to most employees. Too damn bad for them.
There are others that bother me, too.
Also, under the "Equal Pay for Equal Work" rule, turns out that if two people of the same gender and do the same work but get different pay, and it's not because of seniority or merit wage increases, there's no right to file a complaint. So the person in charge of payroll could be giving more money to the person they want to bang, for example, and that's perfectly legal. There's only cause for complaint if there's a gender difference.
I guess they figure no one will ever discriminate against two people of the same gender. Or maybe that such situations would just be too hard to figure out and so let it be ignored.
I dread to think of the bullshit that would arise in cases of transgender discrimination. If someone who's mtf gets paid less that a woman who does that same work and all that jazz, how is that handled? To get the claim recognised, the trans person would have to claim to be male when they aren't, or else have the claim invalidated, even though it may be just as blatant and disgusting a form of discrimination.
Most employers, if you work into overtime hours, will pay you 1.5 times your hourly rate of pay for it. But it's only legal to pay you 1.5 times minimum wage for overtime hours. Someone who makes more than 1.5 times minimum wage as their regular hoursly pay therefore gets no additional compensation for working more than 44 hours a week.
Granted, right now working for $12.75 an hour sounds pretty freaking sweet, and I personally would have no complaints at making that hourly wage. (That much money could change my life around in under a year!) But (and it may just be my privilege showing here), it really burns me that the companies who actually give you 1.5 times your hourly wage for overtime hours don't have to do so, because it means that other companies can dick over their employees and squeeze many more hours out of them without having to pay them compensation for it.
I'm glad that New Brunswick no longer has the lowest minimum wage in Canada (that dubious honour now goes to BC), but even so, it's still freaking sad that here, a person working 40 hours a week on minimum wage can afford a bachelor apartment in a crappy section of the city, if you follow the advice of financial experts who say that one's rent/mortgage should be no more than 30% of their income. And I live in one of the cheaper cities in NB! In Fredericton, cost of living is even higher!
I've gone through too much crap with employers who think they can get away with illegal and immoral actions because they think that their employees won't know any better. Then it turns out that sometimes they do things that really suck that are still actually legal, and it feels like falling into a hole and not being able to get out again.
No, today I'm talking about my province's ridiculous labour laws.
We actually have some truly shitty labour laws in New Brunswick. But the one I'm really steamed about now is that it's technically legal in New Brunswick to have a person work 7 days a week, each and every week.
Here, it's the law to give a person 1 day off per week. That isn't a calendar day, though. That's just a single 24-hour period. Which means that a person can legally have a schedule that looks like the following:
Mon: 11 AM - 5 PM
Tues: 5 PM - 9 PM
Wed: 11 AM - 5 PM
Thurs: 11 AM - 5 PM
Fri: 11 AM - 5 PM
Sat: 11 AM - 5 PM
Sun: 11 AM - 5 PM
That gap between finishing work on Monday at 5 and starting the next shift at 5 the next day counts as a person's "day off."
And such a schedule wouldn't even put somebody over the 44 hours a week needed to get overtime, either.
Not sure if that's legal in every province. But the fact that it's legal at all anywhere here is a load of bullshit.
What surprises me is that more unscrupulous businesses don't take advantage of this. People would complain, but legally they'd have no recourse.
Never mind that such a schedule would be very physically and emotionally draining to most employees. Too damn bad for them.
There are others that bother me, too.
Also, under the "Equal Pay for Equal Work" rule, turns out that if two people of the same gender and do the same work but get different pay, and it's not because of seniority or merit wage increases, there's no right to file a complaint. So the person in charge of payroll could be giving more money to the person they want to bang, for example, and that's perfectly legal. There's only cause for complaint if there's a gender difference.
I guess they figure no one will ever discriminate against two people of the same gender. Or maybe that such situations would just be too hard to figure out and so let it be ignored.
I dread to think of the bullshit that would arise in cases of transgender discrimination. If someone who's mtf gets paid less that a woman who does that same work and all that jazz, how is that handled? To get the claim recognised, the trans person would have to claim to be male when they aren't, or else have the claim invalidated, even though it may be just as blatant and disgusting a form of discrimination.
Most employers, if you work into overtime hours, will pay you 1.5 times your hourly rate of pay for it. But it's only legal to pay you 1.5 times minimum wage for overtime hours. Someone who makes more than 1.5 times minimum wage as their regular hoursly pay therefore gets no additional compensation for working more than 44 hours a week.
Granted, right now working for $12.75 an hour sounds pretty freaking sweet, and I personally would have no complaints at making that hourly wage. (That much money could change my life around in under a year!) But (and it may just be my privilege showing here), it really burns me that the companies who actually give you 1.5 times your hourly wage for overtime hours don't have to do so, because it means that other companies can dick over their employees and squeeze many more hours out of them without having to pay them compensation for it.
I'm glad that New Brunswick no longer has the lowest minimum wage in Canada (that dubious honour now goes to BC), but even so, it's still freaking sad that here, a person working 40 hours a week on minimum wage can afford a bachelor apartment in a crappy section of the city, if you follow the advice of financial experts who say that one's rent/mortgage should be no more than 30% of their income. And I live in one of the cheaper cities in NB! In Fredericton, cost of living is even higher!
I've gone through too much crap with employers who think they can get away with illegal and immoral actions because they think that their employees won't know any better. Then it turns out that sometimes they do things that really suck that are still actually legal, and it feels like falling into a hole and not being able to get out again.