Where does your employer rank?
Un-fun fact: lawyers, articling students, and law students, like some other professions, are not entitled to most of the basic employment rights under the Ontario Employment Standards Act due to s. 2 of Ontario Regulation 285/01. Unlike most workers, they are not entitled under statute to basic rights such as a minimum wage, paid overtime, meal breaks, holidays, or time off work.
However, some law students, articling students, and lawyers are able to obtain all of these basic employment rights via contract and more! Sadly, some secure none. Others achieve partial success.
Legal employers have no statutory obligation to provide dinner to their employees when they are working late, but many choose to do so in order to incentivize employees to work late at the office and focus their time on billable work instead of cooking. Employers’ dinner policies vary from the boujee to the non-existent. Here is an authoritative and scientific ranking of them all.*
S-Tier
The Boujee Café
This is the stuff of Canadian dreams and American tech workers’ realities. Companies like FAANG (Meta (formerly Facebook), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Alphabet (formerly Google)) have on-site cafeterias with countless high-quality options. While official numbers cannot be found, some Googlers report over 30 different places for employees to dine at on Google’s main campus.
The meals are free, so there is no need to worry about delivery apps or expense reports. They are also highly convenient. You don’t even have to leave the campus. And they always have different cuisines on rotating seasonal menus, so you don’t get tired of them.
I have no critiques.
A-Tier
The Catered Meal
Each weekday, employees are offered several dinner options from a rotating menu. If you are working late, you can select one option and at dinner time, it is delivered to your office or kitchen. No need to pop out of the office or meet a delivery person. That brief encounter with a food delivery driver is always awkward anyway!
The meals are healthy and tasty, but you only get a couple options each day. Some might complain about the lack of options. However, if you are working late, you probably have decision fatigue. So, the lack of options will probably feel like an unexpected blessing.
B-Tier
The Food Delivery App Credit
You automatically get an Uber Eats, SkipTheDishes, or DoorDash credit applied to your account if you are working late at the office. The credit can be used for delivery or pickup.
All three apps are essentially carbon copies of each other and have access to the same restaurants. The only notable differences are that a few restaurants are exclusive to one app and that if your employer uses SkipTheDishes, your meal credits can slowly earn you Skip Rewards.
The huge variety of food options on the apps is the biggest pro. However, two significant cons bring these down to the B-Tier.
First, most employer app credits have not caught up with inflation. It’s hard to find a dinner on Bay Street within the bounds of your app credit. To be sure, you can pay the difference out of pocket, but it’s still annoying when you’re working unpaid overtime at the office and already bought a dinner that is sitting at home.
Second, if you are trying to grab dinner past 6pm in the Financial District, you are probably going to have to walk a fair bit because of foot traffic and needing to coordinate with your food delivery courier. This takes time away from finishing up your work and finally going home.
C-Tier
The Ritual Credit
You automatically get a Ritual credit applied to your account if you are working late at the office. But Ritual only offers pickup.
Ritual, like the other apps, has a good selection of restaurants. Similar to SkipTheDishes, using your employer dinner credits slowly earns your Ritual Rewards you can use for meals when you are not working. You can also earn Ritual Rewards by offering to “piggyback” orders: i.e., bringing back your co-worker’s meals from the restaurant when you pick up yours.
The lack of delivery options pulls Ritual down to the C-Tier. Unless you can piggyback on a coworker’s order, you have to go out and pick up your own dinner, which significantly limits your options to what is close by.
The Expense Reimbursement
You can order delivery or pickup dinner from anywhere but need to keep your receipt and file an expense report. While the flexibility of this option initially sounds appealing, pretty much anywhere you would want to order from is on the other apps. Too many options can also lead to analysis paralysis, especially if you are tired from making decisions all day.
The pain of filing an expense report for every dinner brings this down to the C-Tier. Having an assistant to file the expense reports makes it better. But you still have to keep and organize your receipts and make sure you are reimbursed. You don’t have to worry about reimbursement when your employer just gives you an app credit.
D-Tier
The Ad Hoc Dinner Policy
If you are working late at the office on a group project, it’s likely that a Partner or Senior Associate will buy the team dinner. But if you are working late at the office by yourself, tough luck! Hopefully you brought a big lunch.
The ad hoc dinner is often just pizza or Chinese food, but at least it’s a free dinner (although there is no such thing as a free “lunch”).
F-Tier
No dinner policy
A lack of policy is also a policy. You never get dinner no matter how late you work, how often you work late, or how much unpaid overtime you do. Clearly F-Tier.
Even worse if you work for certain employers that try to guilt you when you ask for some cheap takeout or even a dinner break.
*Editor’s Note: This tier list is neither authoritative, scientific, nor exhaustive.
