Dear Customers and Friends:

As you may or may not know the Goverment of Ontario has worked on the new Bill that will influence the way many staffing agencies will be doing bussines in Onatrio. Bill 139 passed royal assent on May 6, 2009 and will become a law on November 06, 2009. 

Thanks to many staffing firms in Ontario who signed an online petition, it helped to stop certain aspects of the original Bill that would pose significant hardships to the staffing industry. 

However, some areas of concern were passed and will prove to be challenging for many staffing providers in the months to come.

Here are some of the highlights of the Bill139 that will come into effect in November of 2009;

 How does it affect the Staffing firms?

• The Bill defines an assignment employee to mean an employee by a temporary help agency for the purpose of being assigned to perform work for an agency client on a temporary basis.
• Staffing firms as of November 2009 will be required to give notice to any assignment employees whose work term is coming to an end. If notice is not given then termination pay must be paid out. The need to provide a record of employment to a temporary associate once each assignment is complete will greatly increase as the need to define an assigned employee becomes necessary.
• Staffing firms must now provide written documentation to all associates about their work assignments. The worker must receive this documentation before they have begun the assignment. This will be quite challenging for those firms who work with asap client orders.
• Bill 139 prohibits any fees being charged to an assignment employee in connection with registration, assigning them work and resume or job preparation. Staffing firms cannot restrict an assignment employee or client to enter into an employment relationship with each other or charge a fee for this relationship after 6 months beginning the day on which the employee first began to perform work for the client.

Over the past few months, Alliance Employment Services was working very closely with our recruiters to clarify these definitions and to ensure that our systems and processes are up to date and can accommodate the changes imposed by the Bill. The ability of a Staffing Agency to complete in the open market was once determined by their ability to find the people and finance the payroll, with the passing of Bill 139, agencies will meet more procedural challenges. Staffing Agencies must have dynamic technology in place that can set them apart from their competitors. We have developed a system that meets the needs of the Canadian market place and we are ready to meet the current challenge set up by Bill 139.

How does it affect the Clients?

Bill 139 has proven the fact that staffing industry has become an important and integral part of the Ontario economy, therefore it needs to be regulated more.

The most important task of the bill 139 in our opinion is to protect workers that participate in the temporary worker market. It  has given the assignment employees the same rights as to the regular part-time or full time employees.  As an employer who uses staffing services to sustain high turnover productions or maintain productivity during seasonal or temporary projects, vacation times or as a tool that helps fund and process payroll for large and labour intense projects the most significant change that will affect you will be the fact that assignment workers starting January 2009 are eligible for Statutory Pay. That in line with the Minimum Wage level, Payroll Taxes, Vacation Pay and WSIB Premiums influences pay rates paid to the workers and as a result bill rates charged to you. Most of you who have used our services this year have already seen the integration of the Statutory pay in the bills that you received. Other changes brought by the Bill 139 are mostly challenges that affect the agencies operation and their in-house procedures.

Starting November 2009 the agency will be obligated to provide the worker with the detailed assignment description and its terms. We will start asking the customer upon order placement to be, whenever possible,  a little more specific about the terms of the order placed. It will help us deal with the termination issue as well as make better scheduling. Everything else remains the same and as mentioned in the previous paragraph Alliance Employment Services and its recruiters are equipped to handle the new challenges and will continue providing you with the valuable service that helps your focus on more important functions of your business.

We pride ourselves in being a leader in the ever fluctuating staffing industry offering our recruiters the utmost in back office support. We welcome your comments and suggestions on how your company perceives the changes and would be happy to discuss strategies to help us meet all the requirements of the new legislature.

 Thank you again for your support of the staffing industry.