Twitter owner Elon Musk's mandate that employees stop working remotely and put in "long hours at high intensity" discriminates against workers with disabilities, a new lawsuit claims.
Dmitry Borodaenko, a California-based engineering manager
who said Twitter fired him this week when he refused to report to the office,
filed a proposed class action against the company in San Francisco federal
court on Wednesday.
Borodaenko said Musk's recent call for Twitter employees to
return to the office or quit violates the federal Americans with Disabilities
Act (ADA), which requires employers to offer reasonable accommodations to
workers with disabilities.
Borodaenko has a disability that makes him vulnerable to
COVID-19, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit said many Twitter employees with disabilities
have been forced to resign because they could not meet Musk's demanding
performance and productivity standards.
In a separate complaint filed in the same court on
Wednesday, Twitter was accused of laying off thousands of contract workers
without giving the 60 days' notice required by federal law.
Twitter is already facing a proposed class action, also in
San Francisco federal court, claiming it violated that law by abruptly laying
off about 3,700 employees, or half the company's workforce, after Musk took
over.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment
on Thursday. Musk has said laid-off workers were offered three months of
severance pay.
Under federal law, employers can provide workers with 60
days of severance pay in lieu of giving notice.
Shannon Liss-Riordan, a lawyer for the plaintiffs in all
three pending cases, said that since taking over Twitter, Musk "has put
the company's workers through a great deal of pain and uncertainty in such a
short amount of time."
There is little legal precedent on when remote work
qualifies as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA, and the question
ultimately turns on the facts of individual cases. Because of that, disability
bias claims can be difficult to bring in a class action lawsuit.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which
enforces the ADA, said in guidance released in 2020 that remote work can be a
reasonable accommodation when it would not create an undue burden on an
employer. © Reuters