So I work for a pretty big company in the customer contact department. Due to COVID, we all got laptops and have been doing the full extend of our job from home. Since we have been doing this for well over a year and the company is still making record profits, they are clearly not suffering from this.
However, due to COVID measures disappearing, the company now announced that they are so happy and we will now have to come back into the office three days a week and we “get to keep working from home” two days a week. The argument is that it's good to see colleagues.
Honestly, this would only mean that I will lose about 5% of my paycheck to pay for gas, and lose about 26 hours of free time a month just traveling back and forth and not being home on my lunch break. Add to this that I'm autistic, and being in an environment with a lot of others and lots of impulses stresses me out and drains my energy, and it's safe to say that this will not improve my mental health.
I have already brought this up to them before, and even showed them that I had loads of stress related sick days before COVID hit, and since we work from home I had none at all. Their response was nice, although they still wanted me to come in and just “find a quiet corner”.
My question is: if I decide to just ignore them and don't go into the office, but still work all my hours and do my job, can they fire me purely for not working in the location that they desire? I believe that when we got our laptops, we did sign a paper saying that working from home was only temporary, but then again, if I do my job and work my hours, do they really have the legal right to fire me, just because I choose to work in an environment that's comfortable for me?