Soumission

Subject: Federal Labour Standards Review

This is in response to correspondence received in regards the review of the federal labour standards.

We are in the transportation business and have long haul drivers working for us. We are continuously running into problems wherein the driver does not perform his duties yet we still are responsible to pay him for the trip and/or mileage rates.

We are in the produce business and there are multiple pickups and sometimes drivers will leave pickups behind and the customer takes deductions from our load rates. We still pay the driver the full amount due to him as we are not allowed to take unauthorized deductions. This sometimes means we take a serious loss on a trip and we feel that drivers when committing to employment should be responsible for doing the job to the best of their ability. Under the labour code at the moment the employer has no recourses.

Once in a while you get a driver who will actually not even load the truck but will drive the truck and trailer back to our yard empty. In this case we make no money at all and even then according to the present labour code we still have to pay the agreed rate of pay.

I find this situation totally unfair as where are we as the employer supposed to get the money to pay the driver when he brings the unit empty and we therefore have no one we can invoice. This has actually happened and when I have spoken to the Labour Board about what I can do all they say is that I have to pay the driver but I can fire him. Where is the justice?

In any job performance plays a large role and therefore these employees should be aware that there are consequences to not doing the job they have undertaken in a responsible manner. I realize it does not mean that you use any excuse to not pay drivers but rather the odd one who deliberately sets out to not perform his duties should not be paid the full rate either.

There should also be a time limit as to when an employee can report claims to the labour board. We sometimes have drivers who will wait over a year and then make false accusations. I have had to spend numerous hours finding all the backup documents and verifying that the claim is false. There should be perhaps a limit of six months and then at least the files are not in storage and readily available.

At the present time I have advised that there is no time limit and this seems totally unreasonable. A lot of times when more than a year goes by your memory may also not be as fresh and you spend a lot of time investigating the situation to explain what had happened.

We had a driver who actually did this a few months ago and he had been gone for more than a year. We had to retrieve files from storage to find all the relevant documents. This individual also each time we would investigate and the investigator found his claims to be false would then find something else to complain about.

He not only wasted days of my time but also the investigator who was handling the claim. In situations like this if an employee makes a claim he should make all claims at one time so that we may investigate each one at the same time and respond accordingly.

We have also been victims of fuel fraud. Once in a while a driver will fuel another truck using our fuel card and get cash from the other party. We know how much fuel we spend on a particular trip and sometimes before we are that this is going on hundreds of dollars are lost. Again we have no recourse but to eat up the losses and let the driver go. If we cannot proof our claim then we are also left with no option but to pay the two weeks pay as well. This again does not seem fair as the driver has already ripped you off.

We have had numerous drivers throw their keys at us and quit. A few months later they will go and complain to the labour board that they were in fact fired unjustly. At present there is a huge shortage of class 1 drivers and we are not in the habit of firing drivers when we always have trucks parked due to a shortage of drivers.

Always in these cases the drivers win the argument and we have to pay the two weeks pay. Even in situations where I have appealed the decision and gone to arbitration the driver still wins. We had a situation where the driver totally changed his story from what he had told the labour board and still he won.

At present that system works very well for employees but does not consider the employer at all. A lot of times we feel that there is not point in opening a business especially in BC as the laws are way behind the times.

We are very happy to know that a review is being done as it is long overdue.

Thanks you for letting us have our input.