GoodLife mass termination email not illegal but 'uncaring': employment lawyer

A person makes their way into GoodLife Fitness in downtown Ottawa on Friday, July 17, 2020. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick

The fitness industry has been hit hard by the pandemic, making it no surprise that many gyms have cut down on classes and instructors.

But even with the complications of a pandemic, mass terminations still need to be handled delicately, according to experts and former employees levelling criticism at how GoodLife Fitness handled the firing of nearly 500 instructors earlier this month.

The fitness empire terminated 480 employees across Canada on March 2 by mass email, citing the challenges of COVID-19 as a mitigating factor preventing them from keeping the instructors on.

“Unfortunately, due to COVID restrictions on group activities, most of these Instructors have not worked for the majority of the pandemic,” Jason Sheridan, Chief Operating Officer at GoodLife Fitness, said in a statement to CTVNews.ca Sunday.

Letting go hundreds of employees by email may raise eyebrows, but it’s not completely unheard of, according to Jon Pinkus, employment lawyer and partner at Samfiru Tumarkin LLP.

“There's certainly nothing illegal about terminating by email, and in fact, when you're terminating someone's employment, it is always advisable to do it in writing,” he told CTVNews.ca in a phone interview.

However, depending on the length of time employees have invested into a company, more personal notice might be expected, he said.

“I would typically advise companies to at least preface it with a phone call. Quite frankly, even if they had invited everyone to a sort of a global conference call to tell them […] that the termination letters were coming, than at least they're not just all of a sudden, out of the blue getting an email that their employment of maybe 10 years is over.”

Carolyn Bell, a fitness instructor in the Vancouver area, had worked for GoodLife since 2009, but was put on furlough when the pandemic hit.

She said that while she wasn’t surprised that she was among those let go this month, she was disappointed to be told the news in an email after her years working there.

“I was gutted that they didn’t have the balls to actually ring us in person,” she told CTVNews.ca in an email.

She had been teaching five classes at GoodLife while also subbing for others before the pandemic, but had run more classes in the past, even achieving one of the GoodLife Fitness Instructor of the Year awards in 2014.

“At points during my time at GoodLife I taught up to 14 classes a week, worked on front desk and was also a Group Fitness Manager,” she said.

GoodLife Fitness told CTVNews.ca in a statement Thursday that the termination affected employees in the “specific role as group fitness instructors,” and that “prior to the pandemic, these instructors were in part-time or occasional roles, and, on average, taught less than 2 times per week.”

Gyms across the country have been affected harshly by the pandemic, with lockdowns causing closures and health restrictions on indoor activities limiting the classes that could occur.

In February 2021, GoodLife Fitness accessed $310 million in loans through the federal government’s large-employer emergency loan program, called LEEFF, which was created as part of the Canada’s economic response to COVID-19.

Jane Riddell, president of GoodLife Fitness, told CTVNews.ca in an email that these funds were accessed “to help the company through the significant impacts of the pandemic and the restrictions put on our industry,” and said they had already been required to pay it back including the borrowing costs.

“This loan was not a bail-out or grant,” she said. “LEEFF was always intended to be a short-term bridge loan. We have now borrowed other money that is a better fit for our longer-term business needs in order to pay that loan back.”

Bell said she had seen the writing on the wall when she had asked to come back to GoodLife last summer as things were opening up a little more, and “was told it wasn’t possible.”

But the email termination still felt abrupt.

GoodLife Fitness defended the move by saying, “this approach was taken to ensure quick and consistent equitable communication with all those affected as it was important to ensure instructors were informed simultaneously.”

According to Bell though, not all the emails were sent at the same time, leaving some instructors in the dark for hours.

“I texted a colleague to see if she had received the same thing,” Bell said. “She hadn’t, but texted back later in the day that she then received an email.”

She said that in the email, GoodLife offered eight weeks termination pay, which is in line with the minimum amount of severance for an employee in British Columbia who has worked more than eight years for a company.

The only coworkers of hers who did not receive some form of severance, as far as she’s aware, were ones who hadn’t responded to a return to work questionnaire sent around in January, she said, who were “deemed to have left voluntarily.”

Pinkus said he was aware of former employees of GoodLife Fitness reaching out to their firm alleging that they had received little to no severance pay in their termination.

However, he clarified that he hasn’t personally spoken to any of them nor is he currently representing anyone.

“But I know that there's certainly a lot of people kinda wondering what to do,” he said. “There are provisions dealing with mass terminations which create additional termination pay obligations.”

GoodLife Fitness have stressed that all employees were treated fairly.

“All terminated instructors were provided with their entitlements, including termination pay and/or severance pay, in accordance with the employment standards legislation currently in force in the province in which they were employed,” Riddell said.

But employees who are feeling slighted by the situation may be eligible for more severance than they received, depending on how long they worked for GoodLife, Pinkus said.

“The law considers various factors that are supposed to approximate how long it would reasonably take them to find a new job,” Pinkus said. “So if they're older, if they've been there for longer, if they have a job that is not plentiful — you know, probably not a lot of places hiring personal trainers or people who manage per trainers right now.”

He said that depending on how high up a person was in an organization and the length of time they had worked there, some could be entitled to up to 24 months pay.

For Bell though, the lingering issue is the hurt from being treated as an afterthought by a company she had given so much to.

Although she was able to find other jobs during the pandemic to supplement her income, such as working part-time at a local golf club and a bookshop, she did so “hoping that eventually I’d be back at GoodLife.”

Now she says it’s unlikely she’ll ever want to reapply there — even though GoodLife Fitness mentioned in their statement on the terminations that fired instructors were welcome to look into open positions at GoodLife.

“The way the terminations were dealt with was uncaring,” she said. “They could have easily called […] or done a Zoom type call for areas. This has really changed my view of the company. I was a massive supporter, did a a lot for community events, corporate, warm ups for the sun run, etc., and they just ditch us.”