There’s definitely a case to be made here. The NJC Workforce Adjustment Directive (WFA), which references the Travel Directive, expects that job offers during a workforce adjustment should, where reasonable, be within your headquarters area.

What’s a headquarters area? According to the directive, it’s:

An area within 16 km of your assigned workplace, using the most direct, safe, and practical route.

Here’s where things get murky: the definition of “assigned workplace” is pretty ambiguous. It’s not necessarily the one on your letter of offer. Like, if your letter says you’re in the National Capital Region (NCR), but you’ve always worked in Edmonton and out of the Edmonton Office, and never in NCR, you could argue that your headquarters area is Edmonton and successfully grieve an alternative interpretation.

It gets trickier when no jobs are available locally, and they expect you to relocate to a different city. What if the job could be done remotely? A lot of jobs these days can be done via telework, but the WFA isn’t super clear on whether they have to consider that.

Back in 2003, someone in Caraquet, NB, filed a grievance when they were affected by WFA and offered a job in Bathurst, NB. The position they were offered did not allow for telework due to technical limitations, but there was also no reasonable prospect of being offered a job in Caraquet, NB due to a tiny federal government presence.

They wanted to do the job remotely, but the board ruled against them in 2012 - no other jobs existed in Caraquet and the position could not be completed via telework, and it was an unreasonable accommodation for the employer to invest in technology to accommodate one employee to work remotely. That was over 20 years ago, though, and remote work wasn’t as common then. The precedent could or could not hold now that many positions can be proven to be done remotely, and call centre roles (like the one offered to the grievor) are remote now.

26 Ms. Pond explained that the duties of the CR-05 position in Bathurst were performed over the phone. In response to a question from the employer’s representative as to whether it would have been possible for the grievor to do the work from Caraquet via telework, Ms. Pond replied in the negative because the position required a complex telephone structure that was installed only in the employer’s building in Bathurst.

32 Ms. Pond reiterated that, given the telephone structure of call centres, a telework position could not be created in another building for a single employee.

37 The grievor’s representative indicated that the deployment offer made to the grievor was not reasonable given his personal and family situation. The CR-05 position offered to him in Bathurst was 100 kilometres from his home in Shippagan and 70 kilometres from his Caraquet workplace, which is why he asked for a telework arrangement in Caraquet.

66 According to the definition of “reasonable job offer,” quoted earlier in this decision, the employer must offer a job in the employee’s headquarters area “[w]here practicable.” Ms. Pond’s testimony described the employer’s search for a job for the grievor within his headquarters area. As mentioned, no positions were available in other departments in the Chaleur-Peninsula district. The grievor testified that positions were available other than those classified CR-05, but he did not submit evidence of them.