TL;DR
UK court rules Holiday Extras discriminated against remote worker by refusing to allow her to keep camera off during calls
A UK employment tribunal has ruled that forcing a remote worker with anxiety, ADHD and autism to turn on his camera during a video training session amounted to disability discrimination. Holiday Extras home travel advisor Laura Tait has been awarded compensation after Croydon court found the company failed to make reasonable adjustments to its conditions. The ruling does not ban camera policies entirely, but states that employers must consider individual accommodations for disabled workers who find video calls distressing.
Tait joined Holiday Extras in June 2021 as a remote consultant selling travel insurance, a role where voice calls accounted for around three-quarters of customer interactions. By 2022, he had informed managers that work-induced stress was causing repeated absences and that he could manage his anxiety more effectively through live chat and email channels. He requested that two or three days a week be allocated to text-based work instead of phone or video calls.
The company offered temporary adjustments during periods of phased return, but refused to guarantee a permanent change to its workload, arguing that voice calls were the core function of the business and that changes would be unfair to the rest of the staff. On August 24, 2023, during a remote training session, Tait asked to keep the camera off because she was feeling “super anxious,” but was told to start with the camera on and see how she gets on. She couldn’t face it and had to leave the session.
The 💜 of EU technology
The latest rumors from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise founder Boris and some questionable AI art. It’s free, every week, in your inbox. Register now!
Tait was on sick leave in October 2023 and has not returned. The court found that Holiday Extras failed to make several reasonable adjustments, including allowing him to join meetings with his camera off and permanently increasing his participation in chat and email shifts. It concluded that accommodating Tait would have had minimal impact on more than 50 other travel advisors and that the company’s refusal left it at a substantial disadvantage.
Labor lawyers cautioned that the decision does not mean all camera policies are automatically illegal, as it focused on Holiday Extras’ specific failure to accommodate a worker whose combined disabilities made particularly onerous video calls. The case comes as Courts on both sides of the Atlantic are increasingly examining how workplace policies interact with disability protections.from camera requirements in remote meetings to artificial intelligence systems that penalize workers on medical leave. Compensation will be decided at a later hearing.
