Canadian workers sue Shopify
The court may decide that the brand must pay them $130 million CAD.
Recently Shopify, the Canadian brand giant, decided to lay off 20% of its employees. This company develops software for online stores and retail outlets. CEO Tobias Lütke said the decision was made because the company was going through tough times. Part of the business had to be sold — Shopify Logistics was bought out by another organization.
Fired employees suspect that it's not some crisis but the rise of artificial intelligence. New technology is making it possible to replace some of the human employees with neural networks. But they don't care why they lost their jobs. The subject of their discontent is the lack of layoff benefits, which the company has not paid, although it promised to. They filed a joint lawsuit for CAD 130 million. That's no small sum, but unions in Canada often get their way.
In fact, the company did pay redundancy benefits to those laid off. However, it unilaterally reduced them by thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. The workers had expected one amount when they signed a contract with the firm, but they were paid much less. The lawyers handling the lawsuit say this is the first such brazen case of breach of contract.
The class action lawsuit was led by Ian Russell, who has worked at Shopify for seven years. According to LinkedIn, he specializes in trade and employment law. The company miscalculated badly when it decided to reduce the former attorney's benefits by CAD 50 000. The media got wind of it, and Ian brought disgruntled employees together. The greedy company is probably in big trouble now — because they cut the benefits of several strong lawyers.
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