A remote employee dealing with anxiety has won a discrimination lawsuit after her employer denied her request to turn off her camera.

      A UK employment tribunal has determined that Holiday Extras discriminated against a remote employee by requiring her to turn on her camera during video calls. Laura Tait, a home-based travel consultant with anxiety, ADHD, and autism, received compensation after the Croydon tribunal found that the company had not made reasonable adjustments for her disabilities. While the ruling does not outright prohibit camera-on policies, it clarifies that employers must consider individual arrangements for disabled employees who may find video calls stressful.

      Tait began her role at Holiday Extras in June 2021, focusing on selling travel insurance, with voice calls making up most of her customer interactions. By 2022, she had communicated to her managers that stress from work was causing frequent absences and that she could manage her anxiety better through live chat and email. She asked for two or three days a week to be dedicated to text-based work instead of phone or video calls.

      The company provided temporary adjustments during her phased return but would not ensure a permanent change to her workload, claiming that voice calls were essential to the business and that making alterations would be unfair to her colleagues. On August 24, 2023, during a remote training session, Tait requested to keep her camera off due to feeling "super anxious," but she was told to turn it on initially and see how she felt. She found it too difficult and had to leave the session.

      Tait went on sick leave in October 2023 and has not yet returned. The tribunal concluded that Holiday Extras failed to implement several reasonable adjustments, including allowing her to participate in meetings with her camera off and permanently increasing her opportunities for chat and email work. It determined that accommodating her would have minimally impacted over 50 other travel consultants and that the company's refusal disadvantaged her significantly.

      Employment lawyers warned that this decision does not imply that all camera-on policies are automatically illegal, as the case centered on Holiday Extras' specific inability to adjust for Tait's unique combination of disabilities that made video calls particularly challenging. This case emerges as courts in both Europe and the US increasingly examine how workplace policies align with disability protections, concerning issues from camera requirements in remote meetings to AI systems that penalize employees on medical leave. The amount of compensation will be determined at a later hearing.