Musk’s remote work ban at X survives disability bias lawsuit

(Reuters) – A federal judge in California on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit accusing social media platform X of forcing workers with disabilities after Elon Musk took over the company and banned employees from working remotely.

U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in San Francisco said the plaintiff in the proposed 2022 class action, Dmitri Borodaenko, had failed to show how Mr. Musk’s return-to-office mandate specifically affected disabled employees. The judge gave him four weeks to file an amended suit, including more detailed claims.

Mr. Borodaenko, a former engineering manager and cancer survivor, claims he was fired shortly after Mr. Musk acquired X, then called out Twitter, for refusing to report to the office during the COVID-19 pandemic . The lawsuit alleges that X violated a federal law that requires employers to accommodate workers’ disabilities.

Mr Musk said in a memo to company staff in November 2022 that employees should be prepared to work “long hours at high intensity” or quit, and later tweeted that it was “morally wrong” to work from home.

Judge Martinez-Olguin said Wednesday that the telecommuting ban does not amount to disability discrimination.

“Borodaenko’s theory is improperly based on the assumption that all employees with disabilities necessarily required telecommuting as a reasonable accommodation,” the judge wrote.

A lawyer for Mr. Borodaenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

X responded to multiple requests for comment with emails that said “busy now, please check back later.”

The lawsuit is one of many that former employees have filed in the months that followed Mr. Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the company and subsequent layoffs of about 75 percent of the workforce.

Other cases accuse the company of failing to give employees and contractors advance notice of layoffs, failing to pay billions of dollars in promised severance and disproportionately targeting women and older workers for job cuts. X denied wrongdoing.

Some of those cases have been dismissed, prompting appeals from plaintiffs that are pending.