I've been searching employment Canada's site trying to find information about day rate pay and can't seem to locate anything. A lot of the stuff at the company I work at seems sketchy so I'm trying to find if we're being ripped off. This is my first time in this field of work but the first thing I thought was odd was that on my paystub it says 1 hour worked at over a hundred dollars an hour, again I don't understand day rate but to me that seems like their way to avoid daily over time and the potential of changing it in the books before it's documented.
I work with creek diversion for the pipeline project so pay is decent but I figure we're being shafted in a few areas — moving over here and getting paid a LOA (live out allowance) then they move people into camp and take away LOA; Those people are still living away from home so why was that removed?? The company owner says day rate doesn't get OT, but everything I've read about OT says it HAS to be paid over X hours worked.
Another thing is that they've also tried to changed the schedule, meant to be 28 on and 7 off, 12 hour days, because some people were burning out. I don't think anyone actually ever worked that schedule because some were being scheduled for up to 50 days straight. They said they applied for a schedule variance change to 21/7 that requires 51% of employee signatures to go through but everyone was unhappy with what they offered but they implemented it anyways and basically said “too bad” and so that's what it is now.
Some of the more righteous employees have been reaching out to employment Canada and the labour board in hopes of getting answers but it can be a long process so I'm looking for similar situations or answers here on Reddit. I've heard possibilities of back pay owed for unpaid overtime, which would be an unreal amount of money for a lot of people so I definitely want to get to the bottom of this.