According to the amended complaint, Lin said he'd participated in daily morning engineering status meetings through Webex/Skype; participated in internal project status meetings through Webex; participated in weekly project status meetings concerning ongoing projects; and executed and completed all tasks through the company's VPN. He also claims that three white employees, two of them engineers, had all requested WFH and been approved on March 26, 27 and 28.
He also claims that CGIT's"corporate office in Texas was preventing Medway from implementing safety measures."Plaintiff's health concerns were well founded. On April 1, 2020, five of Defendant's employees were out sick. The next day, it was reported that the wife of an employee tested positive for COVID-19. The following day, an employee of Defendant tested positive for COVID-19.
His former bosses at CGIT, meanwhile, claimed last week that if he had come to work on March 31, 2020, he would not have been fired. In its response to the motion for summary judgement, CGIT claims the case should never go to trial,[PDF]:"There is no evidence that the decisionmakers ever raised any issue concerning Plaintiff's accent or ethnicity."
It also asserted that Lin didn't have evidence to support a finding that his historical diagnosis placed him at such high risk for severe illness from COVID-19, and claimed that"as a manufacturer of custom high voltage electrical equipment, CGIT was deemed an essential infrastructure business and did not have the luxury of simply shutting down all in-person operations in response to COVID-19, as many other businesses did.
It added that if he had"simply returned to work on March 31 following his two-week stint of working from home instead of unilaterally deciding that he was not going to return until he felt it was safe, he would not have lost his job."[PDF], filed in 2020, says he asked to work from home because he was 55"with a long-time high blood pressure medical problem, and that he lived with his mother, who was subjected to high risk of COVID-19.