Written by Kieran Delamont, Associate Editor, London Inc.

BACK IN EARLY May, Bell Canada appeared to be tightening the leash on so-called ‘coffee-badging,’ the practice of showing up at your office, swiping your badge to get in (and thus registering your in-office presence), maybe grabbing a coffee and then going home to remote work in peace.

And by ‘tightening the leash,’ they were serious — what Bell called a “small number” of employees were fired for, in The Globe and Mail’s description, “intentionally and repeatedly falsifying workplace attendance.”

Almost immediately, employment and labour lawyers had questions about the story, which didn’t seem to pass the sniff test for them, noting that it was one of the first and more significant layoff announcements ostensibly related to RTO violations.

Or was it? A group of 46 ex-employees are now suing Bell Canada, claiming the company wasn’t really all that interested in what they were or weren’t doing in terms of coffee badging, but that the company was using their coffee badging behaviour as a thin pretense for layoffs.

According to a lawsuit filed last week, the former Bell employees accuse the company of using their alleged coffee badging as cover for “terminations [that] were purely driven by economic considerations, [which] formed part of a coordinated mass layoff.”

Lawyers for the plaintiffs claimed it was a “massive culling,” and suggest that some employees were skipping the RTO with full knowledge of their managers. “We have it in writing that some of them were authorized to disregard the policy,” said lawyer Jean-Alexandre De Bousquet, who told the Toronto Star, “it’s like Bell can’t fire people fast enough.”

Also complicating things is the claim by several plaintiffs that they were hired as remote workers over a decade ago, pre-lockdowns, pre-Covid. “We’re talking about people who have been hired 12 years ago and never stepped foot in the office. They never agreed to this,” said De Bousquet, speaking to CBC.

Bell, unsurprisingly, disputes these claims, and says they had thoroughly investigated the coffee badging allegations. Still, if the claims hold up in court, it would be a notable precedent, and one of the first legal tests of something that has long been informally alleged: companies using RTO as a workforce reduction tool. “If they succeed, the case could raise questions about whether some companies are using return-to-office enforcement as a tool for workforce reductions while minimizing termination costs,” wrote The Logic.

Might it put other forms of malicious compliance in the spotlight, too? Either way, employment lawyer Sundeep Gokhale told CBC that things like this around RTO mandates and flexible work are likely to keep employment lawyers busy for the foreseeable future, adding, “It’s an incredibly sensitive and high-volume, topic.” 

For more perspective on this issue, check out this week’s Terry Talk below.

PRODUCTIVITY

Why adults still like stickers

I made progress. It is noticeable. The prize may be uncertain and distant, but the sticker is immediate and definite

SURPRISE, SURPRISE: IN the AI-powered, vibe-coded-app-enabled era of supercharging your productivity with umpteen AI agents running in loops to automate the drudgery and free your time up for deep focusmaxxing work, some people are still struggling to get things done.

Powerful AI models may be able to solve incredibly high-level math problems, but they’ve yet to solve a problem as tricky as procrastination.

For that, maybe you need a gold star sticker, an advanced, frontier-level technology deployed in such places as daycare and kindergarten — and maybe one that seems to be catching on with fully grown adults in need of a low-tech way to motivate themselves.

“There’s only so many times you can get told off by an app or your watch,” said Bek Grey, a healthcare professional in the UK who explained her sticker system to The Guardian. “This is a nicer way of trying to motivate and discipline yourself.”

You can do an adult sticker chart pretty much any way you like; there are no rules about how or when or for what you can award yourself a gold star sticker, beyond the notion that you have to do something to earn that sticker.

Some have experimented with turning it into a bingo card (“I’ve found that it makes my tasks feel less overwhelming and adds some fun to my work routine,” wrote a bingo-method enthusiast). Others stick with the stickers. Psychologists say that it can be a valid approach. “I’ve had many clients who tried positive self-talk, only to find it slid off,” psychologist Rod Mitchell told GOOD. “Stickers worked for them.”

As for why they work, that is harder to say. Science writer Kate Horowitz, after getting experimental with stickers herself, queried some other sticker users as to why stickers, specifically, worked for them, and got responses like, “I don’t get it,” and “Absolutely no idea.” Some suggested it might be the tangible, lasting nature of the sticker. Others speculated that it works best with adults who didn’t get the gold stickers as children, and are now “making up for lost time.”

Whatever the efficacy, you may be tempted to give it a try. We are in an era where talk and anxiety about productivity is everywhere, with a lot of ideas and apps but not a lot of actual solutions floating out there. Maybe after Anthropic and OpenAI rake in their billions off the IPO, the sticker entrepreneurs — like Lucy Mountain, who started the Silly Little Star Charts company — will be next in line.

“It’s not just about tapping into your inner child,” she said. “I do just think it’s a system that works.” 

CAREERS

Doubling down on doubling up

After dropping following the pandemic, the share of people working multiple full-time jobs is on the rise again

IN THE YEAR 2026, with companies handing you your walking papers at the first sniff of some coffee badging or quiet quitting, there are still some relics of 2021-2022 out there: the ‘polygamous workers’ holding down multiple full-time gigs at the same time, piloting a rig of several laptops and devices, all on the down-low from their (numerous) employers. (One estimates puts it at around five per cent of the workforce.) 

Some are even quasi-famous for their achievements: last year, a tech founder went viral on X for calling out one guy, Soham Parekh, for working “at three to four startups at the same time.” One job-juggler, pseudonym Damien, told Business Insider he was working five jobs, pulling in $746,000 USD each year.

The ethics, legality and incentives to doing this kind of job-juggling have been debated to death over the last few years. (To recap: Why would anyone do this? The money; Can they do it, legally? Depends, but there’s not really a law against it, unless your contracts explicitly forbid it; Should you do it, ethically? That’s between you and your higher power, be that a boss or an almighty deity.)

What’s much more interesting is another question: how do you do it these days, when every keystroke or badge swipe is logged and, increasingly, analyzed for compliance?

Business Insider recently dove into this question, looking at how the job-jugglers are pulling it off in 2026. AI tools, unsurprisingly, are doing some heavy lifting — one worker, Daniel, said he uses Claude and Copilot “constantly” to manage two full-time jobs. One of them requires a few in-office days, so he just started bringing his second work laptop to his in-office job and “carefully squeezing in work.”

Others are trying to strategically choose which jobs they take. Damien, the worker making $746k a year, said he starts his day at 4 a.m., staggers the time he logs on to work based on the time zones, and focuses on jobs where management “overestimate the amount of work his jobs require.” With a mix of carefully choosing which jobs you take, some automation technology and, to be fair, a lot of luck, there are still many workers out there managing to keep their heads above water.

Jared Procopio, an AI and tech commenter, thinks part of the explanation is that it’s often extremely hard to prove. “CEOs and HR departments have sensed the overemployment trend for years, but they have a very hard time sniffing it out, even when it’s taking place right under their noses,” he wrote.

In bigger companies, though, you’re just anonymous enough to make it work. “In larger megacaps, where every employee is a number and their productivity is a tiny percentage notch in a chart, a lot of the time leadership doesn’t even know their names, let alone how many jobs they might be working,” said Procopio. He foresees a world where, despite RTO mandates and keylogging surveillance tools, the ranks of the polyworkers is more likely to go up than down.

“The concept of a job is evolving, mostly because employers throttled loyalty to near zero, meaning pretty much all jobs can be considered contract jobs now,” he surmised. Right now, multiple jobholders are a minority, but “that number is gonna climb fast. Because once someone realizes their employer views them as a line item to be optimized away, the ethical calculation changes.” 

OCCUPATIONS

The perfect job

Meet the two soccer fans making 50k each to watch every World Cup match

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