Zach Chertok, Aberdeen’s analyst for human capital management (HCM), held a video conference with a rising and prominent employment lawyer out of Vancouver, BC, Canada, Erin Brandt, to understand more about international employment law between the US and Canada, with a focus on BC. As COVID19 exposes significant weaknesses in the state of employment, the goal of the conversation was to learn more about what companies do right and wrong as they seek new and potentially more stable markets to expand into as business at home contracts and shifts.
The US and Canada have very different legal systems, with the latter delegating the specifics for employment law heavily to the provincial level. With that in mind, different provinces are guided by different legal frameworks that outside employers need to keep in mind when expanding into, and hiring within, those provincial markets.
In her line of work, Erin finds that American companies coming into BC are unaware of some of the contractual requirements the province has and that, at times, whole clauses used in American employment contracts are completely null and void under BC law. Erin also noted that a growing reliance on term workers — contracted, temp, contingent, or freelance workers — has prompted BC and other provinces to step up worker protections with federal guidance in response to employment type changes.
In the US, these workers, although heavily used in some work types, often provide employers with the advantage of not having the same employment protections as their full-time, salaried, or unionized counterparts. Companies that come to BC expecting to carry out business the same way they do at home find that later down the line, they pay a price for bad assumptions about the legal state of the work culture.
Zach and Erin further discussed the value of retaining employment lawyers as well as the value of knowing and handling the law prior to entering a new market. While the topics focused on applications in BC, knowing your risks before entering into a new market can prove quite valuable. In BC, for example, many companies reduce their risks on entry if they retain a local employment lawyer to configure their work culture around local regulations. While the lawyer’s job is to explain the provisions of the law, operations and HR teams can reconfigure resource and workforce plans to be better optimized on day one and to reduce the risk of costly legal errors when something goes wrong with an individual’s employment status. Similarly, HR technology companies that purport to be globally oriented from a compliance standpoint can benefit from retaining legal advice from local employment lawyers as external subject-matter-experts (SMEs).
Together, these resources provide exceptional value to organizations’ ability to seamlessly expand into and operate within new markets.
