SCC Endorses Bank Overtime Lawsuits, Granting Class-Actions Statuses

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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The Supreme Court of Canada has made way for two class-action lawsuits against CIBC and Scotiabank to proceed through, which are hunting for hundreds of millions of dollars in lieu of unpaid overtime. The banks had previously acquired a leave to appeal in a decision from a lower court, however, now the Supreme Court has dismissed the application.

The lawsuits claims that thousands of banks’ workers were deprived of being paid for overtime they were assigned to do in addition to the work finished in due standard hours. A lower court refused to allow a class action status to the CIBC case, whereas, on the other hand, a different court had allowed class action status be granted to the Scotiabank lawsuit. Nevertheless, the Ontario Court of Appeal has now announced that both cases, which are certainly yet to be proven in court, shall be dealt similarly and ruled they could go ahead.

The case against CIBC was initiated by the banks’ teller, Dara Fresco, as she filed the lawsuit in June 2007. Fresco was representing a huge number of more than 31,000 tellers and other front-line customer service employees working at more than 1,000 CIBC branches across Canada, also including assistant branch managers, financial service representatives, financial service associates and branch ambassadors. Whereas, a personal banking representative at Scotiabank, Cindy Fulawka, filed the other class-action lawsuit alongside against the bank in December 2007, in which she represented almost 5,000 Scotiabank personal or senior bankers, financial advisers and small business account managers.