Ensuring Compliance: Understanding Digital Signature Lawfulness for Outsourcing Services Contract in Canada

How to eSign a document: digital signature lawfulness for Outsourcing Services Contract in Canada

the popular restaurant chain freshie known for its healthy menu is coming under fire the company replacing some of its in-store cashiers at certain ontario restaurants with workers in nicaragua who run the cash virtually via a video link the virtual cashier is working for as little as three dollars and 75 cents an hour the canadian labor congress among those who are criticizing what fresh she is doing warning that it uses technology to skirt around canada's labor laws john pincus is my guest he's an employment lawyer joining us from toronto john good to see you again your thoughts on the story well this is i think another example of the law perhaps not keeping up with technology we have seen some changes in the employment standards act for instance to deal with work from home arrangements and telecommuting and maybe some more changes maybe on the way to deal with this is this legal strictly speaking as far as what i can see what's been publicly reported i would say that it is legal employment standards in ontario only apply to either someone who's working in ontario or who is working elsewhere but it's a continuation of work that's being done in ontario which doesn't appear to be the case here so that means that they're not covered by uh provincial legislation and it's a provincially regulated industry uh which means that they only have to comply with the employment standards laws of that country in this case nicaragua tell me about the ethical issues at risk here well uh you know it's in my in my job we don't usually advise on ethical issues but i think we've we've seen that that come out we've seen the public response to this uh where uh you know we have these employment standards there for a reason um and if companies can get out of that by simply saying uh we're going to go to a country where the wage is less and that takes away work from people here then that could pose an ethical issue on the other hand i'm sure the companies would argue that these are jobs that we were unable to fill in ontario and therefore it's just a function of the labor market canadians are used to of course dealing with people who are overseas and you think about call centers for example and i'm curious you know does the same thing you were outlining apply in those situations in other words you know the laws have to follow what goes on in those countries where those call center employees are you know we're really actually talking about the same thing call centers are the perfect example that is the quintessential example there's really nothing different about this except i suppose the you know the the queasiness factor um that we are seeing from the public's reaction to this in that you are actually seeing the person uh who in a sense is almost there and the interesting thing is as technology continues to improve and becomes more realistic it may continue to feel more and more like the person is there but earning much less yeah you raise such a great point you know people are appear to be you know less concerned when it's a call center necessarily than when they walk in to order something and there's this person on a screen and you kind of get this sense of well where are they who are they what are they getting paid how are they being treated you think this is a new trend john that we're going to start seeing well we have started to see it already in the u.s for example uh the fast food chain jack in the box has tried this with respect to drive-through orders so whereas i believe when you go to pick up the order there is a person there but when you give the order the person coming out of the intercom maybe somewhere around the world so we are certainly seeing this uh start to emerge in pilot projects in the u.s and and now in canada and uh it may it may continue uh to increase not just as a cost-cutting measure but perhaps as a way to respond to the fact that it may be more difficult to hire and find people to work in these industries there we go uh thanks for this john it's good to see you again i appreciate it likewise john pinkus employment lawyer