I've been telling you and you haven't been listening: get your sorry butts back into the office, pronto! -- AK
https://www.businessinsider.com/employee-return-to-office-mandates-no-legal-recourse-employer-2024-9
It's 2021, one year after the COVID-19 pandemic transformed the workplace. Your boss says the company does not plan to require employees to return to the office. You give up your $3,000-a-month apartment in the city to buy a house hundreds of miles away.
Fast-forward three years, and now the company requires you to either come into the office five days a week or leave.
This is a reality that remote workers around the US are either facing or bracing for — some of them wondering whether they can successfully fight these mandates in the courts.
The answer, according to employment lawyers, is — not really.
"Unless there's a protected reason under established law" such as a medical circumstance, "then you have no recourse," Ron Zambrano, the employment-litigation chair at the California law firm West Coast Trial Lawyers, told Business Insider.
When Amazon announced its plans last week to end remote work and require corporate employees to be in the office five days a week, some staffers swiftly criticized the megacorporation's decision in an internal Slack channel.
The move by the Seattle-based tech giant came after other major companies, including Walmart, recently hardened return-to-office rules. And the latest push by companies to get workers back at their desks could trigger an even broader RTO trend.
Some workers have filed lawsuits against their companies or charges with the National Labor Relations Board over return-to-office mandates.
But remote employees who simply argue that returning to the office is an inconvenience to their lifestyle have "zero chance" to fight an RTO mandate with legal action, Zambrano said.
The vast majority of employees across the US are considered "at will," meaning an employer can terminate them at any time as long as the reason for the dismissal is not illegal. At-will employment also means that an employee can quit at any time.