A New Jersey drug manufacturer agreed to pay $116,666 to resolve an American employee’s national origin and disability discrimination charge alleging that it permitted Indian national employees to work remotely from India for personal reasons but did not allow her to do the same, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission announced Thursday.
The 2025 charge against Novadoz Pharmaceuticals claimed that the American employee was instead forced to take leave. EEOC alleged that its investigation found reasonable cause to believe that the company retaliated against the employee in part by forcing her out of her job.
EEOC said the conduct violated the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Parties to the dispute settled via the commission’s pre-litigation conciliation process, EEOC added. Novadoz and MSN Pharmaceuticals LLC agreed to revise their anti-discrimination and reasonable accommodation policies, adopt revised complaint procedures and conduct training as part of the agreement. The firms also committed to a two-year reporting period with EEOC.
In a statement accompanying the news, Arlean Nieto, acting director of EEOC’s New York district, said that employers cannot make decisions about remote work based on an employee’s race or national origin. Nieto also noted that forcing an employee with a disability to take leave is unlawful where an alternative reasonable accommodation that would permit the employee to continue working exists.
Remote work has for years become increasingly accepted by courts as a reasonable accommodation under the ADA. That trend became even more apparent in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, when swaths of employers migrated workplace operations to work-from-home and remote status during the height of the pandemic’s disruption.
But remote work is not always reasonable within the ADA’s meaning, an attorney previously said in an opinion piece for HR Dive, and the fact that an employer permitted remote work temporarily during the pandemic does not necessarily mean it must continue to do so in all cases moving forward.
Organizations may nonetheless find themselves at legal risk when they issue blanket bans on all remote work. That is a point made by EEOC earlier this year, when the commission issued a technical assistance document advising federal agencies that remote work may be the only effective reasonable accommodation for qualified employees with disabilities, whether it is offered on a full-time, recurring or situational basis.
“We strongly caution agencies against revoking previously granted telework without first making an individualized determination in each case,” EEOC said in the document.
The agency has previously come to settlement agreements on behalf of plaintiffs alleging that they were unlawfully denied accommodation in the form of remote work. In April, FedEx agreed to pay $280,000 to settle such a lawsuit, in which EEOC claimed that the company revoked telework accommodations for dispatchers despite not requiring in-office presence as an essential function of their jobs.
