Back in the early 1980s, a tugboat captain in Tampa, Fla., crashed his boat into a piling under the Howard Frankland Bridge, which crosses Old Tampa Bay. The barge wasn’t badly damaged, but it took out a piling causing a section of the bridge to collapse into the water below. Several motorists were killed, the tugboat was struck by falling debris and sunk, and traffic had to be rerouted around the fallen span for more than a year afterward.
The captain and crew survived the accident but their employer withheld pay for causing the mishap. A labour court disagreed, ruling that the workers should have been paid right up until the moment the boat slipped beneath the waves.

Now, acknowledging that there are differences between labour laws of the state of Florida and the ones that govern your operation, this tale illustrates the havoc an employee at the helm of a big piece of machinery can create–and how employers can misinterpret their legal obligations to their workers. For instance, if you’re a federally regulated employer, the Canada Labour Code restricts you from making unauthorized deductions from wages for any reason, under any circumstances. Period. Unless the employee gives specific, written authorization for you to do so, says David Leroux, a technical advisor on labour standards with the Client Education & Training Branch of Human Resources Development Canada’s (HRDC) Labour Program.

Leroux says unauthorized deductions represent a significant number of the investigations his department undertakes. This is where damage to the truck or goods comes up again and again, he says. An employer may indeed have written authorization to deduct the cost of damages from an employee’s paycheque, but only after a “sign-this-or-you’re-fired” kind of scenario. That’s coercion, Leroux says, and an investigator can still issue a payment order against the employer. The only legal way an employer can garnish wages is though civil action, such as small claims court.

Regular payments such as charitable donations, savings plan contributions, medical and dental premiums, life insurance and long-term disability premiums, or RRSP contributions also require signed authorization; such an agreement should set out the amounts of the deductions, the purpose, and the frequency. Likewise, tickets and fines can only be deducted from an employee’s wages if that employee gives written consent. If the employer feels the employee is responsible to pay them, an alternative is civil court.

Adding complexity to the situation over withholding wages are the myriad compensation schemes for drivers. Are performance or safety bonuses subject to protection under the Canada Labour Code? Maybe. Leroux says bonuses are a gray zone, where each case must be considered on its own merit. If a performance bonus were to start at $1,000, with amounts deducted as violations occur, could an employer “deduct” $100 from a driver’s bonus for leaving a load lock on a loading dock, or for bending a bumper? “In the case where it is wages, it too would be protected from unauthorized deductions,” he says.

Workers not covered by the Code, such as owner-operators, are not granted the same protection afforded to employees. The terms of the owner-operator contract are all that stand between you and a dispute over deductions. But in the case of an owner-operator employing a driver, the owner-op would be considered an employer for the purposes of the Code and subject to all the same obligations that any other employer would be, including the restrictions that prohibit arbitrary and unauthorized deductions from their employees’ earnings.