Would you be happy sitting next to a workmate who has Covid-19? And if you're the boss can you tell people who have tested positive they have to stay away?
The government has dropped the last remaining Covid mandates meaning if you test positive you are no longer legally required to self isolate for seven days.
By dropping the requirements quite suddenly it has put a lot of employers into a lot of uncertainty about how to some of the issues that will arise as a result, Dundas Street Employment Lawyers' Jack Rainbow told Checkpoint.
Do you have an obligation to tell your employer or workmates you have Covid?
This was a tricky situation, Rainbow said.
"On the one hand you've got privacy considerations about your own medical information that you're not necessarily at liberty to disclose to other people.
"But on the other hand you also as an employee have health and safety obligations to the organisation you work for and your colleagues."
The short answer, he said, was "probably yes".
What about your employer's obligation?
"The employer has an obligation to keep their staff safe and healthy and so they need to consider all risks that may arise and they've got to take all reasonably practical steps in the circumstances to do that."
It could look different in different workplaces, he said.
Can a boss require you to stay away from work?
"In some circumstances, yes," Rainbow said.
But a fair process would need to be followed first, he said.
"To do that you'd want to consult with your staff before implementing some kind of blanket policy, you'd need to have a reasonable basis to do so, so you need to establish how that risk will arise of them being in the workplace and then you'd want to implement that policy so everyone's aware of it, knows what it means and has had a chance to feed into it."
This would be an interesting point of conflict, he said.
"Say you have an employee who may be Covid positive but is actually asymptomatic and is really, for all intents and purposes, well enough to work and there's nothing preventing them from performing their job, in those circumstances, they could return to work but actually their employer is keeping them out."
If they weren't sick and didn't need to be using their sick leave but an employer was requiring them to stay away, it would be the employers obligation to pay them, he said.
In short, Rainbow believed people would need to seek individual advice for their particular type of workplace.
The Ministry of Health was still encouraging people to stay at home for five days if unwell or if you tested positive.
