As many white-collar employees enter a third year of working from home, lawsuits demanding reimbursement for home-office expenses are on the rise.
In the more than two years since the pandemic shut down many offices, white-collar employees across the country have been forced to set up desks in cluttered kitchens and cramped bedrooms, reinventing how to work, day in day out, on the fly.
Home expenses such as telephone and internet fees, extra energy to heat or cool a house and office supplies can add up to $50 to $200 a month per employee, according to more than a dozen lawsuits examined by The Times. In the lawsuit, he claimed that after he was ordered to work from home, starting in March 2020, he had to foot the bill for work expenses, including his internet use, extra electricity and use of his personal laptop and cellphone, at a total cost of “several thousands of dollars.”
Seppala said it was already difficult to make ends meet in the high-priced Bay Area. Once he found he had to pay for his daily lunch plus the other office expenses, money began to get tight. The companies that are being sued for failing to reimburse their employees for business expenses have, according to Ackermann, argued in court that the pandemic caught them off guard and unprepared to respond.
The lawsuits highlight one of the most dramatic changes the pandemic brought to the business world: the widespread transfer of employees from business offices to home offices to help minimize the spread of the coronavirus., 71% of those employees with jobs that could be done at home were working from home all or most of the time in the fall of 2020. In contrast, 23% of those workers said they teleworked frequently before the coronavirus outbreak.
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