AstraZeneca cuts bonus for working at home, worker files lawsuit

livemint.com:

AstraZeneca Plc has been sued in South Carolina by a former senior director who claimed that the company refused to pay her over $125,000 in bonuses because she worked from home in 2022. In the lawsuit, Elmarie Bodes, who was AstraZeneca’s senior director of business transformation until January, said that the drugmaker owed her a $124,443 performance bonus and stock options worth $65,000. Bodes claimed that the company told her because she worked entirely from home last year and did not come to the office at least three days a week, her performance bonus would be cut in half and she would also not get the stock options.

She alleged that AstraZeneca breached the contract and violated the South Carolina law by retroactively changing the bonus criteria without giving her any notice at all. Bodes has sought to recoup the money she claims she is owed along with attorney fees and other damages. After the pamdemic, several companies across the globe issued the return to office policies and ended work from home policies.

The rate of people working from home fell from almost 18% in 2021 to 15.2% in 2022, according to a new survey on life in America released on Thursday by the US Census Bureau. To increase the office attendance, Google had said that office attendance will be incorporated into worker’s performance review. In August, Amazon.com Inc.

chief executive officer Andy Jassy said that employees who are resisting its new return to office policy, it is probably not going to work out for them. In March, a federal judge in a California court refused to allow a petition by an Amazon worker to pursue claims on behalf of nearly 7,000 other employees that the e-commerce company did not cover home office expenses. Noting that at