Changes to Alberta Labour Law

Alberta’s Employment Standards Code provides minimum standards to employment that apply to most employers and employees in the province, except for those working in federally regulated industries.  Several changes have been made to the code, which take effect January 1^st, 2018.

Some of these changes include:

- Employees will be eligible for current and new leaves after 90 days, rather than 1 year

- Unpaid job protection for compassionate care leave will be extended to 27 weeks, rather than 8 weeks

- Maternity/parental leave now align with federal guidelines

- Employees will be entitled to a 30-minute break (paid or unpaid) with every 5 hours of consecutive employment

- Permits that allowed employees to pay those with disabilities less than minimum wage are no longer available

- Overtime agreements will allow time to be banked for 6 months rather than 3

- Overtime banking will be calculated at 1.5x for all overtime hours worked, rather that hour-for-hour

- General holiday pay will be calculated as 5% of wages (4.2% for agriculture employees), general holiday pay, and vacation pay earned in the 4 weeks immediately preceding the holiday

- Employees must be paid 4% or 2 weeks of their total wages as vacation pay until they have been employed for 5 years, after which they must receive at least 6%

In AgExpert Analyst, we worry about both general holiday pay and vacation pay.

It is important to note that vacation pay and holiday pay are two separate types of pay and cannot be combined into a single amount.  This would make the paystub incorrect, and does not take into consideration the “4 weeks prior” clause for general holiday pay.

AgExpert will be unable to do automatic calculations for general holiday pay.  Instead, you will have to create a new pay type in your payroll module, and use the currently existing reports to do a manual calculation.

In the payroll setup, you will create the new pay type as follows:

Please note that this pay type should not be included in the vacation calculation.  The only checkbox that should be marked is ROE (Earnings).

This pay type can then be added to each individual employee.

You will use 1.000 in the Hours/Qty field, which will then allow you to enter how much general holiday pay the employee will earn on the individual cheque, based on your calculations.

You can use the Employee Earnings and Deductions Report to get the total of all wages and vacation paid out in the four weeks prior to the holiday.  You can use a custom date range to pull the information for the four-week period.

The table view will total each employee’s information for you.

Vacation pay is setup in Payroll > Setup > Vacation.  It is easiest to set it up by weeks, as specified in Alberta’s labour code:

Make sure to click Apply Changes after making these changes.  You can then edit each employee to define whether the employee will accrue vacation or have it paid out on each paycheque.

Once you save your changes, vacation will be paid to your employee as your setup instructs.

For more information on the changes to Alberta Labour Law, visit https://www.alberta.ca/employment-standards-changes.aspx and https://www.alberta.ca/es-exceptions-farm-and-ranch.aspx (In English only).

Last updated on May 25, 2018 by FCC AgExpert