For unionized employers

Train the peoplewho make the decisions.

A 107-module labour relations curriculum for the supervisors who actually run the workday — discipline, grievances, accommodation, safety, and arbitration, plus the conversations the statutes never cover.

Request access See the curriculum

Created by Matt Laframboise

The gap

Your labour relations risk is created by people who were never trained in labour relations.

Almost every grievance, human rights complaint, and arbitration starts with an ordinary decision made quickly by a front-line supervisor. That supervisor was promoted because they were good at the work — not because anyone taught them condonation, the duty to accommodate, or what a culminating incident actually requires. The expertise sits with a specialist who finds out afterward.

Who actually decides

The team lead deciding whether to send someone home
The supervisor writing the first warning
The manager who hears the concern before it is a grievance
Whoever is on shift when a worker refuses unsafe work
The scheduler filling a shift out of seniority order

What they were given to decide with

A policy binder they read once at orientation
A lunch-and-learn, eighteen months ago
An email with the collective agreement attached
The person before them, who also guessed
A call to HR — after the decision was already made

The cost of that gap is not abstract. It is the warning that gets overturned because the file was condoned, the accommodation that becomes a complaint, the grievance that could have ended at Step 1. Every one of them was decided months before anyone called counsel.

The curriculum

Two pillars, because the law is only half the job.

One pillar teaches the legal and procedural architecture. The other teaches the conversations that decide whether any of it lands — the ones no arbitrator will ever read. Browse the whole thing below.

tracks: 27tracks
modules: 107modules
assessment questions: 856assessment questions
lexicon terms: 374lexicon terms

LR Fundamentals

Essential knowledge for every manager.

1The Employment Relationship25 min
2Introduction to Labour Law in Ontario25 min
3Reading a Collective Agreement20 min
4The Manager's Role in a Unionized Workplace20 min

A supervisor who knows the seven tests but can’t hold the conversation still produces the grievance.

Most training teaches one half. Labour IQ was built to teach both.

Why it sticks

Training they can’t click through.

Most compliance training is survivable without learning anything: pick the longest answer, pick B, click next. If your people can pass without understanding, you have a completion record and no change in behaviour — and the completion record is worth nothing when the decision goes wrong.

Try the sample question in this section. It is taken verbatim from the curriculum, distractors included.

Answer positions shuffle on every render
There is no “usually B.” Option order is randomised each time a question is served, so a learner who memorised a position learns nothing from it.
The right answer isn’t the longest one
Every question in the curriculum was audited so the correct option is never the giveaway — the standard shortcut for faking your way through a test simply doesn’t work here.
Eight questions per module, drawn from a pool
Repeating a module doesn’t repeat the same eight questions in the same order, so completion reflects understanding rather than memorised recall from a single attempt.
The explanation is the teaching
Every answer — right or wrong — returns the reasoning, not a score. The assessment is a teaching surface, not a gate.

Duty to Accommodate · Module 4

When is the duty to accommodate triggered?

Delivery

Built to be taught, not just assigned.

Sending a course link to forty supervisors and hoping is not a training programme. Labour IQ runs three ways at once — and the same module counts however it reached the learner.

Self-directed

Learners work the Academy at their own pace. Reading, a decision scenario, then the assessment — with progress, streaks and levels carried across sessions.

Presented live

Every module is also a slide deck with full speaker notes. Present from a laptop, mirror to a projector in a second window, and run the room without preparing a thing.

Credited after the fact

Record attendance for a session you delivered, and the module completes for everyone who was there — including the XP — the next time they sign in.

Proof it happened

Certification exams

Per-track, per-pillar and a final certification, each drawn from the full question pool.

Named certificates

Issued on completion, watermarked to the learner, with verifiable authorization codes.

Spaced repetition

A review engine re-serves questions from completed modules, weighted toward weak spots.

Administrative record

Who completed what, and when — the evidence a regulator or an arbitrator may eventually ask for.

And the tools they keep using

The part that outlives the training. Decision tools your supervisors reach for on the day it actually happens — each one producing a documented, structured output rather than a gut call.

Just cause analyzer
Discipline builder
Grievance assessor
Termination calculator
ESA quick-calcs
Attendance (AMP) tracker
Accommodation planner
Return-to-work planner

Who built it

Written by a practitioner.

Labour IQ was written by a Regional Director of Labour Relations for a multi-site unionized operator — the person who takes the call when a decision has already gone wrong. The examples are the real ones: the warning that could not be sustained, the accommodation that was never documented, the grievance that should have ended at Step 1.

It is Ontario-anchored, and it is deliberately plain in its language — written for a workforce where English is frequently a second language, and where the reader is a charge nurse between two floors, not a lawyer at a desk.

What this is not

Labour IQ is training, not legal advice, and it does not replace your counsel. It is designed to make the people around you better at recognising the moment counsel is needed — and at not creating the problem in the first place.

In the same family

Labour Matrix

Labour IQ trains the judgment. Labour Matrix is where the resulting decisions are recorded, tracked to their deadlines and held in a form that survives arbitration. They are separate products, and each stands alone — but they were designed by the same practitioner, for the same operator, around the same view of what defensible actually means.

labourmatrix.ca

Questions

The things operators actually ask.

Including the four where the honest answer is some form of “no”. Those are here on purpose — you would find them out in the first demo anyway, and it is cheaper for both of us if you find them out now.

How long does it take?

The full curriculum is about fifty hours— 107 modules of 20 to 50 minutes each, across 27 tracks. But almost nobody does all of it. Tracks can be switched off for your organisation, and learning paths assigned by role, so a front-line supervisor gets a supervisor’s path and an HR business partner gets theirs. The point is not volume; it is that the person making the decision has had the training for that decision.

Can I see who has completed what across my sites?

Not across sites, and it would be wrong to imply otherwise. Labour IQ runs entirely in the browser with no server behind it, so completion records live on the installation where the learning happened. Within one installation you can see and export what it has recorded — including attendance for sessions you delivered. Rolling that up across a portfolio needs a backend, and that is a real product decision rather than something to pretend is already there. If it is what you actually need, say so in the form.

Does this satisfy a mandatory training requirement?

No — and no training product should tell you it does. Labour IQ is not accredited, not approved by any regulator, and not legal advice. Meeting your statutory training obligations remains yours, and so does deciding when to call counsel. What this does is sharpen the judgment that gets you there sooner. Use it to satisfy your obligations, not as evidence that they are satisfied.

Can we run it as a group session rather than self-paced?

Yes, and this is the part most training libraries cannot do. Every one of the 107 modules is also a full slide deck with speaker notes, built from the same content the module teaches — so what you present in the room is not a summary of the training, it is the training. There is a two-window presenter mode for a projector, and attendance capture by badge scan, camera or straight off a list. Record the session and the module completes for everyone who was there, the next time they sign in.

What do our supervisors need in order to use it?

A browser. No installation, no plugin, no server to stand up, no IT project. It is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no build step, which is why a single site with no technical capability can run it and a multi-site operator with a locked-down desktop image can too.

Where does our data go? We use shared workstations.

There is no backend, no analytics and no telemetry, so nothing a learner types is transmitted anywhere — there is nowhere for it to go. Shared workstations are handled deliberately: signing out clears both that person’s progress and their work product from the browser — investigation notes, accommodation and return-to-work plans, attendance logs, termination preparation. Those name third parties, and leaving them on a shared station for the next person is the failure mode that matters in this product. The honest caveat: the page loads Bootstrap, its icons, the PDF and QR libraries, the fonts and the login animation from public CDNs, so those providers see a request when it opens. No learner data is in those requests.

Is it accessible? We have AODA obligations.

It is built toward WCAG 2.0 Level AA, the standard the accessibility regulation points at: four typefaces including Atkinson Hyperlegible, in-app text scaling and zoom, high-contrast and dark modes, keyboard and landmark navigation, and animation that stands down when a browser reports reduced motion. It has not had a third-party audit, so it is accurate to say it is built toward the standard and not accurate to call it certified. If an audit is a procurement requirement for you, tell us in the form rather than discovering it late.

Is it available in French, or other languages?

No — Labour IQ is English only. It is written in deliberately plain English, which is not the same thing as a translation, and that is a real limitation worth weighing.

Is this only for long-term care?

No. It was written inside a multi-site long-term care operator, which is where the examples come from, but the subject is the unionized employment relationship — discipline, grievances, accommodation, bargaining, arbitration — and none of that is sector-specific. There are dedicated tracks for healthcare and for construction and the skilled trades, and the rest applies wherever there is a collective agreement. If your sector is neither, the tracks you do not want can be switched off.

Is it Ontario-only? We have employees under federal jurisdiction.

It is Ontario-anchored, and it says so rather than pretending to be national — the content runs on the Labour Relations Act, the Employment Standards Act, 2000, the Human Rights Code, the Occupational Health and Safety Act and the workplace safety and insurance regime. Federal jurisdiction is covered as its own track, including where the Canada Labour Code genuinely differs — the overtime threshold, unjust dismissal, certification, and the fact that applying Ontario rules to a federally regulated employee produces a confident, wrong answer. A course vague about jurisdiction is usually vague because being specific would expose that it was not written for yours.

What happens when the law changes?

Content is maintained centrally and updates ship with the product rather than needing anything rebuilt at your end. Being straight about the limits of that: the curriculum is written and maintained by a practitioner doing this work in Ontario, and it has not had external legal review. It names instruments and doctrines rather than leaning on section numbers, which move with amendments. If a verified-currency guarantee is something you need contractually, ask — it is a fair thing to want and it should be agreed in writing rather than assumed from a marketing page.

How is it priced?

There is no list price yet, because the sensible answer differs by an order of magnitude between one operator training a dozen supervisors and a portfolio putting several hundred people through it. What moves it: how many people, how many sites, whether you want it hosted or run it yourself, and whether you need something that does not exist yet — cross-site reporting being the usual one. Tell us which of those you are in the form and you will get a number, not a discovery call.

Get started

Request access.

There is no self-serve trial, and that is deliberate. Training a supervisory cohort is a programme, not a purchase — it works when it is scoped against your agreements, your ladder and the decisions your people actually face.

You tell us about your operation
Sector, size, and the decisions your supervisors actually face — a two-minute form, no sales call required to start.
We scope it to you
A walkthrough of the curriculum against your own scenarios — your agreements, your ladder, your deadlines — and what a rollout looks like.
Your people start training
Self-directed, presented live, or both — with the completion record and certificates to show it happened.