Dive Brief:

• Elon Musk’s edict that workers could no longer work from home and would need to work long and intense hours to remain with the company violates the Americans With Disabilities Act, claims a class-action lawsuit filed by a former employee (Borodaenko v. Twitter, Inc., No. 3:22-cv-7226 (N. D. Calif. Nov. 16, 2022)). The suit also raises concerns that workers receiving severance agreements would “be asked to sign away their rights without notice that they have legal claims of discrimination and that these legal claims have already been filed on their behalf.”
• “Many disabled employees were able to perform their jobs adequately with the reasonable accommodation of working remotely, rather than from a physical Twitter office,” the complaint reads. “Musk’s declaration, however, that almost all employees would need to work out of physical offices made it not possible or viable for many disabled employees to continue their jobs.”
• After Musk’s return-to-work announcement, the plaintiff, an engineering manager for the company since June 2021, informed his manager that, as a cancer survivor, he was at high risk for COVID-19 and couldn’t work from the office while the pandemic was ongoing. He was terminated Nov. 15 for violating company policy, according to the suit. Twitter could not immediately be reached for comment.

Dive Insight:

The pandemic forced a lot of workplaces to shift to remote arrangements out of safety concerns. But now, as employers have tried to...

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