Deloitte joins the rest of the Big Four - staff to receive overtime
I'm not at all surprised that you'll find my site if you Google big four Canada overtime - I already pointed out that three of the big four are paying out overtime to their non-CA staff and seniors. n.b. provincial laws treat CA, CGA, CMA and CPA and students registered to study for those designations as "professionals" ineligible for overtime pay, regardless of rank.
Well now it turns out that all of the big four are doing it - Deloitte & Touche has joined the party.
A kind reader who worked for Deloitte pointed this out to me - Deloitte's non-CA staff's overtime hours are
about to stop being "unpaid".
The news isn't that fresh, but this isn't the sort of thing you see on the front page of the newspaper - unless you Googled "deloitte Canada overtime" you might not be aware of it.
All the facts for Deloitte are available at the website they setup otplan.ca - a URL which redirects straight to a deloitte.com page.
The general details are the same as with the other Big Four firms. After KPMG got smacked by the courts who pointed out that if you weren't registered as a CA, CGA, CMA - full members or student - everyone realized they better pay up or face lawsuits.
It's a shame it took the threat of massive lawsuits to straighten things out, but hey, no one's complaining once they have cash to look forward to, eh?
Deloitte reports it'll pay within 30 days of receipt of your acceptance of their offer to settle things up.
Letters started going out at the start of June and should all be sent out by August 1, 2008 - if you don't get one - contact the "OT Administrator" through the appropriate channels. such as the official website or 1-866-669-6615. Remember that number is only valid until August 1, 2008.
Interestingly enough, that 866 number belongs to legal firm Koskie Minsky LLP and is used to settle other legal issues like class action lawsuits.
Deloitte's short term savings, long term pain
Another intriguing fact is that Deloitte's practice has been to NOT pay for their summer interns' CA student fees.
The interns, not surprisingly, generally don't end up signing up as CA students, reasoning - correctly - that the firm would pay their fees when they return as full-time employees. The Ontario CA institute - the ICAO - will even let you pick up 8 months of time you spent before becoming legally registered as a CA student, so the interns had all the incentives in the world to take this approach.
All the incentives plus one: by not being legally registered CA students, their work was all subject to overtime labour laws.
Does A Counting School believe Deloitte is going insist on having all their interns getting registered as soon as they show up for work?
Well.
There's not a rhetorical device strong enough to emphasize how obviously they're going to do just that moving forward.
Other facts
As usual employees in Quebec need not apply - Quebec, ironically for being such a leftist jursidiction, has one of the worst rules from the employee's point of view. Unless your effective hourly wage dips below the legal minimum wage times 50% (i.e., less than $12 an hour for last year), you get nothing.
Something I don't recall seeing on the other OT plan sites is the offer to cover up to 50% of legal fees ($250 of $500) to have an independent lawyer review their offer.
Cool.
Full details:
Can I get a lawyer to review my Assessment Letter before accepting?
Yes, you are welcome to have external counsel review the Assessment
Letter before you accept it. Should you wish to retain legal counsel at
any point in this process, Deloitte will pay fifty percent of the legal
fees you incur, up to a maximum contribution of $250 from Deloitte.
I was planning on writing about the nature of being an accountant and
more observations on exam prep, but that'll wait, as this is pretty time sensitive - not to mention a popular topic I find. Writing up something decent that isn't "news" takes more time if you want to get your point across completely and concisely.
I guess the only questions left after this are how the "mid-tier" firms that have non-CA staff will handle matters, and how this'll affect our friends to the south. American labour laws are quite different - I mean, minimum wage alone is about $3 lower in many jurisdictions! - so our precedents may not carry much weight on a purely legal level.
But on a cultural level, seeing the way we're treated will no doubt cause some consternation or interest if word spreads far enough.
So I suppose this is just the sort of story you'll expect to see supressed or "conveniently ignored" by those who have the power to do so. At the same time, I imagine the class action lawsuit squads from California and other more "labour-friendly-ish" states will be all over this like the proverbial seagull on a table of leftovers.