In most Canadian provinces, the minimum notice is 2 weeks. (3 after five years employment) Notice can either be “keep working until X” or “go home now, here’s your pay.” It’s up to an employer whether it’s a good idea to have a bunch of upset employees still working in their plant or office with a deadline looming.
Severance pay for more complex jobs can be much higher, up to a month per year of service to a maximum of 24 months. Age, how hard it is to find a new job - ie. complex or specialized jobs - and of course length of service are factors. An engineer or department manager in a recession will have a much harder time finding equivalent employment than a receptionist or waiter. Also, “you were a crappy employee so we don’t want to pay you much” doesn’t cut it. Either an employee is fired for cause (stealing, insubordination, frequent lateness, etc.) or they are laid off without cause, in which case job performance is irrelevant.
Ontario, as I recall, has special laws dealing with extended layoffs of larger numbers of people, as happens in plant closings. Among other things, the notice is extended and the One fellow I knew was 3/4 the way to early retirement - full pension after 30 years, he had 22. During that round of layoffs, the Ontario layoffs clause kicked in, he was entitled to collect 22/30 of full pension in 8 years, when he was still under 60 - instead of a paltry amount at age 65, the default for leaving the plan before 30.
The courts in Canada have apparently been eroding this entitlement, but the classic Wallace case IIRC involved having security escort the fired employee out for added humiliation. The employer because of their extra leverage owes a duty of care to deal fairly with employees. Humiliation, nasty behaviour, and false allegations of misconduct are quick ways to end up paying more.
For the OP case - if the employer does not explicitly tell the worker they are fired, then they are not. If the employee keeps showing up to work then something is wrong - for example, if he’s guarding a construction site, either the site is still paying the guard contract to the employer, or they should say something. A company can’t really keep enjoying the guard service and say “we don’t owe the contractor anything” if they never said anything. Failure to collect keys and uniform would be some sort of obvious lack of effective notice of termination, I would think. There should be a significant paper trail and witnessed verbal notice, or something, plus behaviour on the part of management to say “goodbye”. (For example, in Canada, for Unemployment Insurance purposes, every terminated employee must get their notice, a government form, so they can apply for UI. If you fired him, where’s that form? What did he say when you gave it to him, or did you mail it to a valid address?)
What would be different would be when the company “drops off the face of the earth”. Small business, can’t pay bills, etc. Well, then, what’s the point - once bankruptcy is filed by a creditor, all activity stops. Wages run up after bankruptcy filing are not part of the proceedings, AFAIK. You can only sue for debt before filing. The common wisdom is that most bankrupt small businesses have no assets, as almost everything of value has been used as security for loans leading up to the end. So even actual wages owed are unlikely to ever be collected.
If there’s no explicit agreement to keep you on after the bankruptcy filing, there’s no employment.
We had one case I recall - an East Indian fellow was stuck in the wrong job, then they tried to fire him for incompetence. He was a mainframe guy, A moved him to Process computers to keep him on during layoffs, then B replaced A and complained he couldn’t do the job. They asked him to “go home and think about whether he wanted the job” and he refused to leave work. They almost called security, until someone had the brains to talk to him and sort it out. Apparently, in India about the only valid reason to fire someone is job abandonment, so employers try all sorts of these “go home now” tricks and claim the person walked off the job.
They did a number of stupid things HR would have told them to avoid, like not telling him about complaints (so he could improve the situation). In the end, he got a good employment lawyer and they ended up giving him 6 months pay instead of the original offer of “stay with a pay cut or get 2 months pay”.
As for someone commission selling - shouldn’t the company notice after 3 months - “Hey, how come Sam’s still sending us new orders, we fired him?” Somewhere around the first month of decent order volume, if they didn’t sort things out, then they were being deliberately exploitative - I’m sure in Canadian law that would fall under fair dealing. (IANAL) Of course, if the original commission deal was poor, why keep selling?
Yes, that was the Kramer one.