No severance for employees who missed email survey, former GoodLife instructors allege
CTV
Two weeks before 480 GoodLife Fitness employees across Canada were terminated by email, another email was sent around, informing a number of fitness instructors that they had 'voluntarily withdrawn employment' because they didn’t respond to a survey that carried a 10-day time limit.
The difference is that those who found their employment at an end in February were not officially let go, the way 480 GoodLife employees were on March 2.
This group were told that they had “voluntarily withdrawn employment” because they failed to respond on time to a survey with a 10-day deadline sent only to their work email.
This meant that if employees — the majority of whom were furloughed or temporarily laid off due to the pandemic and thus not checking their GoodLife email on a weekly basis — didn't see the email, the company would consider them ineligible to receive severance pay.
“That's not what we call a voluntary resignation,” Jon Pinkus, a Toronto-based employment lawyer and partner at Samfiru Tumarkin LLP, told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.
