Suspension upheld for employee who didn't co-operate with co-workers and superiors
The office of the information and privacy commissioner of Canada (OIPC) had reasonable grounds to suspend an employee for 10 days after repeated insubordinate behaviour, a labour arbitrator has ruled.
Lynne Chauvin was a paralegal in the legal services directorate for the OIPC. Initially hired for administrative work in 2007, she was considered a good employee and stuck to timelines. However, when she was appointed as a paralegal a few years after her hiring, the OIPC began having problems with her.
In 2010, Chauvin was disciplined for not co-operating with her supervisor, for which she was suspended for one day. On another occasion, she served a five-day suspension for not allowing her colleagues in the office to access the records and documents information management system. She also submitted unfinished work and didn’t work well with co-workers on projects. Each time Chauvin was suspended, the OIPC gave her a letter warning that further misconduct could lead to more severe discipline, including termination of employment.
In November and December 2010, Chauvin didn’t provide basic information to a new paralegal in the office after it was requested, she was absent at sessions during the OIPC’s information management week that she had been encouraged to attend, she didn’t provide information for a training session and she arrived late to a training session. On Jan. 11, 2011, she was suspended for 10 days.
Chauvin filed a grievance, claiming she was often treated with disrespect by lawyers in the office and her supervisor screamed at her in December 2009. She said she often felt “verbally abused, threatened and harassed.”
The arbitrator found all the incidents that the OIPC used as a basis for the suspensions constituted insubordination, which the arbitrator defined as “when an employee refuses to do what he or she has been told to lawfully do by the employer.” The instances that Chauvin pointed to that she claimed were harassing or disrespectful to her were unrelated to the misconduct, said the arbitrator.
Since the instances of insubordination happened over a relatively short period of time and she had been suspended and warned before, the arbitrator found the OIPC was justified in imposing a longer suspension. The grievance was denied.
“(The OIPC) was justified in imposing a more severe suspension. (It) chose to impose a 10-day suspension. There was nothing unreasonable in the (OIPC) progressing from a five-day to a 10-day suspension in applying the principle of progressive discipline,” said the arbitrator.
