When the officer investigating the former warehouse supervisor's complaint pulled the payroll records for the mid-sized distribution company operating in western Canada, the inquiry did not stop at the 85 permanent staff. The distribution operation depended on a layered workforce: between 15 and 30 temporary workers supplied by a staffing agency filled warehouse roles during peak seasons, while 8 to 12 contractors served as delivery drivers and IT consultants on rotating assignments. The officer's file note flagged the temporary workers in particular, observing that several had worked 50 to 55-hour weeks alongside permanent employees during the 2-year period the supervisor alleged produced $14,200 in unpaid overtime. The HR manager had maintained separate files for these workers, treating them as outside the company's employment standards obligations on the assumption that the staffing agency bore all statutory responsibility. That assumption, the officer would soon explain, misunderstood how Alberta law allocates liability when an enterprise uses workers it did not directly hire.
The Employment Standards Code of Alberta anchors employer liability in the concept of who qualifies as an employer under the statute. The Code defines an employer as a person who employs an employee or who engages a person to perform services, and the definition extends to include a person who was an employer. This language is deliberately capacious, designed to ensure that the statutory protections track the reality of how work is performed rather than the formal contractual labels the parties may have chosen. The definition matters intensely in complaint proceedings because it determines who may be named in a Director's order requiring payment of unpaid wages, overtime, vacation pay, or other entitlements. If an employer mistakenly believes it has no obligations toward workers it obtained through an agency or labeled as contractors, that belief provides no defence once an officer determines the workers were employees who performed work for the company's benefit under conditions the company controlled.