- Philly employers are desperately seeking tech workers even as Silicon Valley giants are laying off thousands The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Layoffs hit two multibillion-dollar S.F. tech companies San Francisco Chronicle
- Why is every tech company suddenly laying off about 6% of its workforce? Fast Company
- Building tech’s talent pool in Philly | Morning Newsletter The Philadelphia Inquirer
- Despite big layoffs, it’s still a great time to work in tech, experts say: ‘I’ve seen bad job markets…this is not it’ CNBC
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tag Archives: Employers
Flu, RSV, Covid: 6 ways employers can deal with a potential wave of absences
Employers may be pushing for more workers to return to the office. But that’s proving to be an uphill battle, especially as the cold and flu season gets underway.
A triple whammy of the flu, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and new Covid variants is already taking hold and forcing some workers to call out sick.
The latest numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that respiratory illness activity is high or very high in 22 US states, with the flu being the biggest culprit at the moment.
And employers are already concerned about mounting absences. A recent survey by human resources consulting firm Mercer found that nearly half of large employers surveyed said Covid-related absences alone are a concern. Among them, nearly a third said their operations are or could be affected by the absences due to acute illness, isolation and quarantine.
Despite concerns about staff calling out, most employers no longer require anyone to wear a mask at work. Fifteen percent of large employers dropped their Covid vaccination requirements, according to Mercer. And among those that have kept them, most don’t mandate that employees get the latest booster shot.
In order to minimize the risk of transmitting viruses at work and reduce employee absences, here are six steps employers can take.
While Covid and flu shots won’t eliminate a person’s chance of getting infected, they have been shown to reduce the severity of the illness.
If employers aren’t mandating vaccines and boosters, they should encourage their staff to get them, said Devjani Mishra, employment attorney with Littler Mendelson. And if possible, make it easier for them to do so – for instance, by providing flu shots and Covid boosters on site or a list of places nearby that provide them.
Before the pandemic, plenty of employees showed up to work with a cold or flu, just to prove their dedication.
Telling staff to stay home when they get sick is key to ensuring they don’t spread what they’ve got.
If someone does come in with a hacking cough or other obvious sign they’re not well, employers should encourage them to go home. If they choose to stay, they should be asked to sit apart from others and tell them to wear a mask. Both are legal requests because they are mitigating measures an employer is taking to ensure a safe workplace, Mishra said.
“If you have an employee coughing and sneezing and not going to a room by themselves, an employer always has the ability to say, ‘we’re concerned there may be a health risk to yourself or to others,’” she noted.
Whatever approach an employer chooses, that approach should apply to everyone who comes in with a contagious virus, Mishra said. “Treat everyone the same.”
[Note: Employers should also follow guidelines from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration when someone has Covid.]
Offering paid sick leave is a good way to ensure employees feel comfortable calling in sick.
Yet a lot of employers don’t provide paid sick leave and they may just offer a few paid personal days. “That doesn’t give people flexibility to stay home [when they’re sick],” Mishra said.
When a worker does come in sick, bosses should ask why. It may be that the employee doesn’t want to burn the few paid personal or vacation days they get or lose out on a day of pay.
Also “employers really need to check and recheck what [paid leave] is available under state and local laws,” Mishra said, noting that many local governments have adopted new kinds of paid time off requirements in recent years. “Not every employer is on top of that.”
Even if an employer requires everyone to be on site for a set number of days every week, letting workers who get sick work from home helps prevent illnesses from spreading. “Consider being flexible,” Mishra suggested.
The good news: Mercer says many of its clients have gotten the memo. “Employers are more flexible than they were pre-Covid about where and when you work,” said Rich Fuerstenberg, a senior partner at Mercer.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics found that absences from work due to child care problems hit a record high in October. That may partly be due to respiratory viruses hitting hard this year.
Even if working parents and their children aren’t getting sick themselves, when there’s an outbreak of Covid or RSV cases at their day care or elementary school, the parent may need to stay home to take care of the kids.
Employers may minimize employee absences if they can subsidize back-up day care options for working parents, Mishra noted.
The initial public health message with respect to Covid was “wear a mask to protect others.”
If an employer is not mandating that employees wear masks this winter, they should have them on hand and publicly support those who choose to wear them.
It’s also important to remind employees that wearing a mask has another benefit, said Mary Kay O’Neill, a partner in Mercer’s health and benefits practice. “Wearing a mask is protective for you.”
California weed laws: Employers will soon be banned for screening workers for marijuana
Employers in California will soon be banned from screening workers for marijuana under a new law.
Assembly Bill 2188, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom, prevents employees from setting conditions of employment based on cannabis use while they’re away from work. It also prevents them from hiring or firing based on that.
However, there are exemptions to the law. Employers can test staff who work in construction or in positions that require a federal background investigation or clearance.
The law still prevents employees from using marijuana while at work, working while impaired, and being in possession of marijuana while on the job.
Newsom signed other similar bills into law. Senate Bill 1186 prevents local governments from banning deliveries of medical marijuana, while Assembly Bill 1706 will allow people to get old marijuana conviction records sealed or cleared.
The laws are expected to go into effect in 2024. Marijuana is still illegal at the federal level.
Copyright © 2022 KABC Television, LLC. All rights reserved.
Supreme Court Blocks Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Large Employers
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday blocked the Biden administration from enforcing a vaccine-or-testing mandate for large employers, dealing a blow to a key element of the White House’s plan to address the pandemic as coronavirus cases resulting from the Omicron variant are on the rise.
But the court allowed a more modest mandate requiring health care workers at facilities receiving federal money to be vaccinated.
The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with the liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority.
The employer decision undercut one of President Biden’s most significant attempts to tame the virus and left the country with a patchwork of state laws and policies, largely leaving companies and businesses on their own.
In both the employer and health worker cases, the justices explored whether Congress had authorized the executive branch to take sweeping actions to address the health care crisis.
The unsigned majority opinion in the employer case said a statute on workplace hazards did not justify a mandate that would have required more than 80 million workers to be vaccinated against the coronavirus or to wear masks and be tested weekly. It also stressed the novelty and sweep of the mandate issued by the Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, saying Congress had not authorized the agency to act and describing its response as “a blunt instrument.”
The mandate “draws no distinctions based on industry or risk of exposure to Covid-19,” the majority opinion said, adding that it was “a significant encroachment into the lives — and health — of a vast number of employees.”
But the opinion said more tailored regulations may be lawful given that “most lifeguards and linemen face the same regulations as do medics and meatpackers.”
In a dissenting opinion, Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan expressed incredulity at the court’s willingness to frustrate “the federal government’s ability to counter the unparalleled threat that Covid-19 poses to our nation’s workers.”
Regulating safety in the workplace, the three dissenting justices wrote, is precisely what OSHA is commanded to do.
They agreed that the key issue in the case was that of institutional competence to address the health care crisis.
“Underlying everything else in this dispute,” they wrote, “is a single, simple question: Who decides how much protection, and of what kind, American workers need from Covid-19? An agency with expertise in workplace health and safety, acting as Congress and the president authorized? Or a court, lacking any knowledge of how to safeguard workplaces, and insulated from responsibility for any damage it causes?”
The wiser course, they wrote, would have been to defer to OSHA.
“In the face of a still-raging pandemic, this court tells the agency charged with protecting worker safety that it may not do so in all the workplaces needed,” the dissenters wrote of the majority’s actions in the case, National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, No. 21A244. “As disease and death continue to mount, this court tells the agency that it cannot respond in the most effective way possible.”
OSHA issued the mandate in November, making exceptions for workers with religious objections and those who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs. The administration estimated that it would cause 22 million people to get vaccinated and prevent 250,000 hospitalizations.
The ruling means that companies across the country must now decide between protecting employees, potentially losing staff members resistant to complying and running afoul of patchwork regulations.
Several major companies, like United Airlines and Tyson Foods, already have mandates, while others had held back and waited for legal battles to be resolved. Some companies have been anxious about losing employees at a time when workers are already scarce. While firms with mandates have said those worries largely have not come to fruition, a national requirement could have helped ease those concerns.
Walmart, Amazon and JPMorgan Chase, three of the largest employers in the United States, have yet to issue broad requirements for their workers. Some companies that have waited have cited concerns about the costs of setting up testing programs and pushback from unvaccinated employees.
Even as companies were deciding how to proceed without backing from the government, the court handed Mr. Biden a victory in the mandate for health care workers.
In a statement issued shortly afterward, the president emphasized the ruling in his favor.
“Today’s decision by the Supreme Court to uphold the requirement for health care workers will save lives: the lives of patients who seek care in medical facilities, as well as the lives of doctors, nurses and others who work there,” he said.
“At the same time,” he added, “I am disappointed that the Supreme Court has chosen to block common-sense lifesaving requirements for employees at large businesses that were grounded squarely in both science and the law.”
That second mandate applies to workers at hospitals and other health care facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
The Coronavirus Pandemic: Key Things to Know
Card 1 of 5
Federal judges in Missouri and Louisiana had blocked the requirement, which has exemptions for people with medical or religious objections, in rulings that applied in about half of the states. It will now go into effect nationwide.
In an unsigned opinion in the case, Biden v. Missouri, No. 21A240, the majority wrote that the health care mandate issued by the secretary of health and human services “falls within the authorities that Congress has conferred upon him.”
The governing statute gives the secretary the general power to issue regulations to ensure the “efficient administration” of the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and parts of the statute concerning various kinds of facilities generally also authorize the secretary to impose requirements to protect the health and safety of patients.
The majority wrote that the mandate “fits neatly within the language of the statute.”
The majority added that facilities that receive money from the Medicare and Medicaid programs must comply with many federal health and safety requirements.
“All this is perhaps why health care workers and public health organizations overwhelmingly support the secretary’s rule,” the majority wrote. “Indeed, their support suggests that a vaccination requirement under these circumstances is a straightforward and predictable example of the ‘health and safety’ regulations that Congress has authorized the secretary to impose.”
In dissent, Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, wrote that “scattered provisions” in the statute did not justify the mandate.
Without “exceedingly clear” congressional authorization, Justice Thomas wrote, the federal government should not be allowed to force health care workers “to choose between losing their livelihoods and acquiescing to a vaccine they have rejected for months.”
“These cases are not about the efficacy or importance of Covid-19 vaccines,” he wrote. “They are only about whether” the agency “has the statutory authority to force health care workers, by coercing their employers, to undergo a medical procedure they do not want and cannot undo.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld state vaccine mandates in a variety of settings against constitutional challenges. The two cases decided on Thursday concerned a different question, that of whether Congress has authorized the executive branch to institute the requirements.
The majority opinion in the case on health care workers seemed to try to harmonize the two rulings.
“The challenges posed by a global pandemic do not allow a federal agency to exercise power that Congress has not conferred upon it,” the opinion said. “At the same time, such unprecedented circumstances provide no grounds for limiting the exercise of authorities the agency has long been recognized to have.”
Emma Goldberg and Lauren Hirsch contributed reporting.
Appeals Court Reinstates Biden Covid-19 Vaccine Rules for Large Employers
A federal appeals court Friday reinstated Biden administration rules that require many employers to ensure that their workers are vaccinated or tested weekly for Covid-19.
A divided panel of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved a stay issued by another court that had blocked the rules. The majority, in a 2-to-1 ruling, said legal challenges to the administration’s vaccination-and-testing requirements were likely to fail.
The ruling is a near-term boost to the White House but was immediately appealed on an emergency basis to the Supreme Court by some employers who oppose the mandate.
The requirements, issued by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and scheduled to take effect in January, apply to businesses with 100 or more employees and cover roughly 84 million workers.
Employers who don’t comply with the requirements could face penalties of up to around $13,600 a violation. The requirements don’t apply to employees who don’t report to a workplace where other individuals are present, employees who only work from home or employees who work exclusively outdoors.
Three Biden administration vaccination requirements have been challenged in courts around the country. One set of rules, applying to many healthcare workers, is already pending at the high court after the Biden administration on Thursday asked the justices to reinstate the requirements as lower courts put them on hold in parts of the country.
The federal appeals court ruling was immediately appealed on an emergency basis to the Supreme Court by employers who oppose the mandate.
Photo:
Bill Clark/Zuma Press
Other vaccine rules that apply to federal-government contractors could land at the Supreme Court soon after lower courts have put them on hold.
The Biden administration has argued its rules are legally sound and urgently needed in light of the continuing health threats posed by the pandemic, including the new Omicron variant of Covid-19 that has led to a spike in infections.
“It’s critical we move forward with vaccination requirements and protections for workers with the urgency needed in this moment,” a White House spokesman said after the ruling.
Republican officials and business owners are among the litigants who have sued the administration, arguing the rules are heavy-handed regulations that exceed the powers of the executive branch.
The requirements “will cause irreparable harm to businesses and employees across the country, and will wreak havoc on supply chains that are already stretched to their limits,” said Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute, an organization representing one group of employers challenging the rules.
Republican officials and business owners opposed to Covid-19 vaccine mandates are among the litigants who have sued the administration.
Photo:
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In Friday’s decision reinstating the OSHA rules for private employers, the Sixth Circuit majority cited the continued Covid-19 public-health crisis and said the federal government had broad authority to ensure workplace safety.
“OSHA has wide discretion to form and implement the best possible solution to ensure the health and safety of all workers, and has historically exercised that discretion,” Judge Jane Stranch wrote for the court.
“It makes sense that OSHA’s authority contemplates the use of medical exams and vaccinations as tools in its arsenal,” wrote Judge Stranch, an Obama appointee. She was joined by Judge Julia Smith Gibbons, an appointee of
George W. Bush,
who said judges should not substitute their judgment for OSHA’s on a matter in which reasonable minds may disagree.
The ruling by the Cincinnati-based court negated a decision by a sister court, the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans, which put the vaccine-and-testing requirements on hold last month. That court said the Biden administration approach raised “grave statutory and constitutional issues.”
The Fifth Circuit lost jurisdiction over its case after legal challenges filed around the country were all consolidated and transferred to the Sixth Circuit by a judicial panel that manages multidistrict litigation.
In dissent Friday, Judge Joan Larsen, a Trump appointee, said OSHA had not offered sufficient justification for adopting a broad vaccine-or-testing mandate, and she questioned whether Congress had given the agency the power to do so.
“OSHA has alerted us to no prior attempt on its part to mandate a solution that extends beyond the workplace walls—much less a permanent and physically intrusive one, promulgated on an emergency basis, without any chance for public participation. But that … is what OSHA has done here,” Judge Larsen wrote. “A vaccine may not be taken off when the workday ends; and its effects, unlike this rule, will not expire in six months.”
Other conservative judges on the court registered displeasure with the Biden administration rules in dissent Wednesday, when the court declined to hear the case with all active Sixth Circuit judges participating, rather than just a three-judge panel. Almost all cases are heard initially by three judges.
Write to Brent Kendall at brent.kendall@wsj.com
Copyright ©2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Armenia will allow employers to fire unvaccinated workers
Partnership for New York City President and CEO Kathryn Wylde says the private sector COVID vaccine mandate will prevent people’s return to work and limit consumer traffic.
Armenia’s parliament approved a law Friday that would allow employers to fire workers who refuse to provide proof of vaccination against COVID-19 or a negative test result.
Russia’s ex-Soviet neighbor has some of the lowest vaccination rates in the Caucasus region.
NYC DE BLASIO VACCINE MANDATE GOING TO BE DIFFICULT FOR SMALL BUSINESSES TO STAY ABOVE WATER: DR. LAHITA
The new rule follows an August order by the ministry of health which required Armenian citizens to provide their employers with proof of vaccination or a negative PCR test every two weeks or face a fine.
FILE – A youth receives a shot of Russia’s Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine (AP Photo/Fernando Llano, File) (AP Newsroom)
“If the employee is not providing a vaccination certificate, or a negative COVID-19 test, the employer is given the right to turn the employee away from the workplace, suspend their pay and fire the employee, if they are off for 10 working days because of that,” Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Ruben Sargsyan said Friday.
CANADIAN DRUGMAKER SAYS ITS COVID-19 VACCINE IS EFFECTIVE
The new vaccination requirement will not apply to the country’s president, prime minister, members of parliament or the National Assembly, the ombudsman, judges of the Constitutional Court and a number of other officials, Sargsyan said.
“This exception was established for the reason that these positions are either (institutional), as in the case of parliamentary deputies, or their holders are appointed in accordance with the Constitution,” he said.
Armenia began its mass vaccination campaign in April with authorities planning to inoculate 700,000 of the country’s 2.9 million citizens by the end of the year. However, only 516,989 citizens had been fully vaccinated by Dec. 6.
CLICK HERE TO GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO
In Armenia, citizens can choose to get vaccinated with the Sputnik V, AstraZeneca, CoronaVac, Sinopharm or Moderna jabs.
Appeals Court Extends Block on Biden’s Vaccine Mandate for Employers
WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court has kept its block in place against a federal mandate that all large employers require their workers to get vaccinated against the coronavirus or submit to weekly testing starting in January, declaring that the rule “grossly exceeds” the authority of the occupational safety agency that issued it.
In a 22-page ruling issed on Friday, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, held that a group of challengers to the mandate issued by the Biden administration was likely to succeed in its claim that it was an unlawful overreach, and barred the government from moving forward with it.
“From economic uncertainty to workplace strife, the mere specter of the mandate has contributed to untold economic upheaval in recent months,” wrote Judge Kurt D. Engelhardt.
He added: “Of course, the principles at stake when it comes to the mandate are not reducible to dollars and cents. The public interest is also served by maintaining our constitutional structure and maintaining the liberty of individuals to make intensely personal decisions according to their own convictions — even, or perhaps particularly, when those decisions frustrate government officials.”
He was joined by Judges Edith H. Jones and Kyle Duncan. All three are Republican appointees.
The Biden administration is likely to appeal, but a Justice Department spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a filing asking the Fifth Circuit to withdraw its stay earlier this week, the Justice Department argued that requiring large employers to force their workers to get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing was well within the authority granted by Congress to Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA. It also said blocking the mandate would have dire consequences.
Keeping the mandate from coming into effect “would likely cost dozens or even hundreds of lives per day, in addition to large numbers of hospitalizations, other serious health effects, and tremendous costs,” the Justice Department said in its filing. “That is a confluence of harms of the highest order.”
The ruling by the panel of the Fifth Circuit is unlikely to be the final word. Some challenges to the mandate are in other circuits, and the cases will be consolidated before a randomly chosen one of those jurisdictions. The Supreme Court is expected to eventually decide the matter.
President Biden announced in September that his administration would issue such a mandate as one of several steps to try to increase immunization rates and end the pandemic, which so far has killed about 750,000 Americans. Other mandates applied to federal employees and federal contractors.
In early November, OSHA, an agency that is part of the Labor Department, issued the standard for companies with at least 100 employees. It would force them to require unvaccinated employees to wear masks indoors starting Dec. 5. Employees who remain unvaccinated by Jan. 4 would have to undergo weekly testing at work.
The proposed rule makes an exception for employees who do not come into close contact with other people at their jobs, such as those who work at home or exclusively outdoors.
A coalition of plaintiffs — including several employers and Republican-controlled states — immediately challenged the employer mandate in court. Their lawsuit argued that the mandate was an unlawful overreach that exceeded the authority Congress had legitimately delegated to OSHA.
Among other things, they argued that the agency has no power to regulate protections against exposure to disease, as opposed to workplace hazards like asbestos, and that framing the mandate as a workplace safety effort was just a pretext for the Biden administration’s real motivation: pressuring Americans who have been reluctant to get vaccinated.
Judge Englehardt’s ruling strongly sided with their point of view.
OSHA, he wrote, was created by Congress to ensure safe and healthful working conditions but was not “intended to authorize a workplace safety administration in the deep recesses of the federal bureaucracy to make sweeping pronouncements on matters of public health affecting every member of society in the profoundest of ways.”
The judge also scored the notion that the circumstances of the rule put forward by OSHA, under authority granted by Congress for “emergency” situations, qualified as an emergency.
“The mandate’s stated impetus — a purported ‘emergency’ that the entire globe has now endured for nearly two years, and which OSHA itself spent nearly two months responding to — is unavailing as well,” he wrote. “And its promulgation grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority.”
Some large employers have already decided on their own to impose vaccine mandates on their workforces, including 3M, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Tyson Foods and the airlines American, Alaska, JetBlue and United. Most workers have complied, though a small number have quit.
Former President Donald J. Trump appointed both Judge Englehardt and Judge Duncan in 2018. Judge Jones was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1985.
Emergency vaccine rule for large employers will be issued ‘in the coming days’
The Office of Management and Budget completed its required review of the emergency rule on Monday.
“On November 1, the Office of Management and Budget completed its regulatory review of the emergency temporary standard. The Federal Register will publish the emergency temporary standard in the coming days,” a Labor Department spokesman said. “The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has been working expeditiously to develop an emergency temporary standard that covers employers with 100 or more employees, firm- or company-wide, and provides options for compliance.”
The spokesman added, “Covered employers must develop, implement, and enforce a mandatory COVID-19 vaccination policy, unless they adopt a policy requiring employees to choose either to get vaccinated or to undergo regular COVID-19 testing and wear a face covering at work. The ETS also requires employers to provide paid time to workers to get vaccinated and paid sick leave to recover from any side effects.”
In September, Biden announced the Labor Department would draft an emergency rule compelling private companies with 100 or more employees to require vaccinations or weekly testing.
“While America is in much better shape than it was seven months ago when I took office, I need to tell you a second fact: We’re in a tough stretch and it could last for awhile,” the President said in a White House speech at the time.
The new emergency temporary standard will require large employers to give their workers paid time off to get vaccinated. If businesses don’t comply, the government will “take enforcement actions,” which could include “substantial fines” of up to nearly $14,000 per violation, according to officials.
Officials have said the standard was a “minimum” and that some companies may choose to go further, including by mandating the vaccine instead of offering a testing alternative.
This is a breaking story and will be updated.
New York employers can’t test workers for weed, Albany says
New York workers can now unwind with weed after work without worry.
Albany’s labor department issued new guidance Tuesday that bans employers in the state from testing employees for cannabis unless the worker seems visibly stoned on the job.
Under the new rules, even reeking like pot smoke would not be grounds for a test, after the state ended its prohibition of recreational cannabis this spring.
“Observable signs of use that do not indicate impairment on their own cannot be cited as an articulable symptom of impairment,” the guidance states.
However, employers are within their rights to ban workers from possessing pot on the job site, according to the guidance.
Cannabis remains illegal on the federal level, and workers who are required to be tested under federal and state law — like commercial vehicle drivers — would still have to, the DOL said.
After former Gov. Cuomo signed the recreational bill into law, the NYPD sent out a memo to cops warning them not to light up.
“All existing patrol guide procedures regarding [marijuana] prohibition as well as drug screening procedures remain in effect,” it read.
“NYPD officers are not allowed to smoke marijuana when they are off duty,” a department spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to The Post Tuesday.
Maid accused of mixing blood, urine in employer’s food
SINGAPORE — A domestic helper accused of mixing her menstrual blood and urine into her former employer’s food claimed trial on Monday (23 August), with her male employer testifying that he had received messages from her ex-boyfriend allegedly alerting him to the incidents.
Canares Rowena Ola, a 44-year-old Filipina, however, denied ever committing the offences and claimed through her lawyer that she had lied to her ex-boyfriend about the disgusting acts. She claimed trial to one count of mischief.
The male employer, who took the stand as the first prosecution witness on Monday, was unable to pinpoint the date or time that the acts were allegedly committed, as the food was consumed long before the police report was made in December 2019.
The software engineer cannot be named due to a gag order protecting his identity. The prosecution applied for the gag order due to the nature of the crime, which might cause embarrassment to the alleged victim or his family.
The court heard from the male employer that the family employed Canares in May 2017. The family had no complaints with regard to her performance until the alleged incident came to light. She stayed in her own room within the flat, which she shared with the man, his wife, their two young children, and the man’s mother in law.
Canares was tasked to care of her employer’s children, and to cook the family’s three meals. She was free to buy any ingredients she wanted, and would at times cook her own food, while cooking separately for the family.
Asked by the prosecution why he decided to lodge a complaint, the man said that around 11.14pm on 15 December 2019, he received a message from an unknown number. He recognised the man in the display picture as the maid’s ex-boyfriend, as Canares had shown him his picture before.
“He sent messages saying that she put menstrual blood and urine in the family’s food. Then I was shocked, he sent a message to both me and my wife,” he said. The ex-boyfriend has since died.
As it was late, the man did not confront Canares, but went to the police station to lodge a complaint. About an hour or two later, two police officers arrived at his house to investigate the matter. The officers woke Canares to speak to her.
“At one point of time she mentioned that she did it…I heard she had done it, mixing these two things into our food, and she said ‘sorry’ many times to me and my wife,” he added.
One or two days later, the man said that he and his wife questioned the maid on why and how she mixed her menstrual blood and urine into their food. He was, however, unable to get specific details.
He also asked if she would do the same thing to her own children, and she said “no sir, no sir”.
He ended up throwing his and his wife lunch boxes away, as well as some utensils.
While she was under investigation, Canares was no longer made to do chores, but continued staying with the man as the man could not find her alternative living arrangements, despite approaching the Philippines Embassy. Asked why he did so, the man said he was “scared” that she was in his residence.
“I was hoping that they can do something about her stay. Either in Singapore or somewhere else, I was hoping that she was out of my house as soon as possible.”
The helper remained in his residence but kept mostly to her room and was not allowed to enter the kitchen alone, even though she was free to move around and out of the house. On 26 December 2019, the man took her to the police station for an interview, and had not seen her since then.
Canares’ lawyer Kalaithasan Karuppaya, however, argued that the maid never mixed her menstrual blood or urine into the family’s food, and that she had lied to her ex-boyfriend.
In reply, the man said, “It’s not just these messages, they were not just the starting point, but after that she accepted (responsibility for the offences by saying so) to me and my wife many times, she apologised many times. Repeatedly she has accepted (responsibility by) saying ‘sorry sorry sorry sorry’.”
However, Karuppaya maintained that his client was simply apologising generally for the inconvenience caused to her employers.
“I put it to you, my instruction, what she has told me, she apologised…she say ‘sorry sir sorry ma’am’, to you on 15 December 2019 for causing you all trouble in the middle of the night,” said the lawyer. The man responded that he had “no opinion” about that statement.
The lawyer added that on the day her two employers confronted her on how and why she had allegedly done the act, the maid was afraid of the man and hence did not deny doing the act.
“You spoke to her in angry tone and she was afraid to answer to you. She was scared to answer you,” said Karuppaya.
The man denied using an angry tone, saying the maid was seated comfortably.
Karuppaya continued, “Whatever answers she has provided, is given to you, were untrue and given in a confused state. She was confused out of fear,” said the lawyer. The man replied that he could not answer to the maid’s feelings at that point in time.
On how his family felt after the alleged incident, the man said they no longer hired a domestic helper and the chores were shared between the three adults.
“We did not want to trust a third (party) in our house with our food from then on,” he said.
An investigation officer who handled the case testified that he had spoken to Canares’ ex-boyfriend and took his statement at a hospital on 20 January last year, where the ex-boyfriend was warded for stage four cancer. This was after he received information that the ex-boyfriend was the one who had asked her to mix her blood and urine into her employer’s food.
“He denied any involvement, it was just a conversation he had with the accused stating that she did put her menstrual blood and urine into her employer’s food,” said the IO.
The trial continues on Monday.
If convicted of committing mischief, Canares may be jailed up to two years, or fined, or both.