A longtime former AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals LP employee is suing the company, alleging she was discriminated against as a woman when the company ended her flexible work arrangement after the coronavirus pandemic, making it more difficult to care for her aging father.
AstraZeneca is a British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company headquartered in Great Britain. with its headquarters at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus in Cambridge. An AstraZeneca representative said the company does not comment on active litigation.
In her Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit filed Friday, plaintiff Monica Tabrizi says she was employed by the company for more than two decades, initially as a pharmaceutical sales specialist and later as associate director of master data management, a position that entitled her to be awarded stock options in the company.
In 2016-23, Tabrizi worked under a management-approved arrangement permitting her to care for her 84-year-old widowed father, the suit states. During the last three years of her employment she was able to work remotely in California where she and her father lived rather than in AstraZeneca’s Delaware headquarters, the suit states.
Tabrizi was given a bonus in 2017 of more than $42,000 for her job production, which she contends demonstrates that her flexible work arrangement actually enhanced her performance.
But in late 2023, after the coronavirus restrictions started easing, management implemented a blanket return-to-office policy that did not consider flexible work arrangements such as Tabrizi’s that were already in place prior to the pandemic, the suit alleges.
“Instead of engaging in a good faith interactive process to determine whether accommodations could be made, they gave her an ultimatum that would require her to be in defendants’ Delaware office three days a week or she would be terminated,” the suit states.
Tabrizi complained that the blanket policy appeared to have a disparate impact on females, who are statistically more likely to take on caregiving responsibilities and need flexible work arrangements, according to the suit, which also states that the plaintiff reiterated her need to work flexibly so she could tend to her own health conditions as well as care for her elderly father.
In retaliation, AstraZeneca terminated Tabrizi in April 2024 and claimed it was “for cause,” but the plaintiff maintains it was because of her complaints about what she believes was the discriminatory nature of the policy directing employees to return to the office and her accommodation requests, the suit states.
Although Tabrizi’s 25-year work tenure with AstraZeneca made her eligible for severance benefits, the company contended that the way in which she was terminated made her ineligible and withheld more than $100,000, the suit states.
“Shocked and in disbelief as to how (AstraZeneca) had handled the situation, the plaintiff was also devastated by the loss of a career she valued for the past 25 years,” the suit states.
Tabrizi seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages as well as attorneys’ fees.