Bell Canada parent BCE has fired dozens of employees for violating its code of conduct by falsifying workplace attendance.
The firings took place after a return to office mandate was put into effect and have resulted in employee backlash and the threat of legal action.
BCE spokesperson Luc Levasseur said the employees were let go for “clear violations of our code of conduct” following an internal review.
“These cases involved deliberate and repeated falsification of workplace attendance, including entering the workplace to record attendance and then leaving the premises,” Levasseur said.
“In each case, there was a thorough investigation and individuals were presented with clear evidence of their misconduct. The majority of individuals admitted to deliberate and repeated falsification of workplace attendance.”
According to a Bell employee with knowledge of the terminations, the investigations found varying strategies that individual employees were using, including swiping access cards just before midnight and then again a few minutes later to record attendance on two consecutive days.
The Star agreed to grant the employee anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Others would go to the office to grab a cup of coffee — a practice called “coffee badging” — or to use gym facilities and then work from home for the rest of the day.
Employment lawyer Jean-Alexandre De Bousquet is representing 30 former Bell employees — mostly based in Toronto — who were fired for “violating Bell’s return to work policy” and are now seeking legal action against the telecommunications giant.
He described the move as “an economic layoff disguised as a mass firing for cause,” and said he estimates hundreds of employees have been terminated over the last three weeks, largely from technology-related roles that he argues can be done remotely from home.
Bell said De Bousquet’s estimate of the number employees who were fired is inaccurate and that terminations occurred in a “small number of individual cases,” but the company would not disclose the exact number.
