Mom Suing Her Employer For Firing Her While She Worked From Her Hospital Bed During Chemo | YourTango

Written on Oct 31, 2024

A mom of four is suing her employer for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act after she was unceremoniously terminated days before Christmas while hospitalized, where she continued doing her job from her hospital bed.

Her story is a bracing example of America's draconian work culture and gives an outright dystopian glimpse into the shocking indifference corporate America shows towards even workers who go to extraordinary lengths to prioritize their jobs.

Lam's story is one that could seemingly only happen in America, where labor protections for workers lag well behind nearly all wealthy countries on Earth.

At the time of her firing, Lam, a veteran professional in finance, was hospitalized for cancer treatment. Despite her grave illness, she continued working from her hospital bed after, she alleges, having been urged by her employer, Boston-based State Street Bank, against taking disability leave for her illness.

She has now filed suit against State Street Bank in New York for violations of the Family and Medical Leave Act. A 2022 federal court ruling deemed it illegal to discourage employees from pursuing leave under the FMLA.

A viral photo, taken from one of the legal filings from Lam's case, gives a truly stomach-turning view of Lam's situation. It shows her in a hospital bed, with a mask on her face and surrounded by monitoring machines, as she diligently works away on her laptop.

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Lam suffers from a cancer called leiomyosarcoma, which attacks the body's smooth muscle tissues involved in involuntary movements, such as those in the stomach, intestines, and blood vessels.

Like a staggering number of sufferers of the rare disease, Lam contracted it due to her exposure to the toxic dust clouds emitted from the World Trade Center site during the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

Lam lived just blocks from the Twin Towers at the time and worked at 4 World Trade Center, a smaller building at the complex that had to be demolished after the attacks.

Like so many others, Lam narrowly missed being at work during the attacks because she was running late due to caring for her then 2-year-old son.

In 2022, Lam discovered the cancer had spread to her lungs and had to be treated with emergency chemotherapy to save her life. After being discouraged from pursuing the FMLA, she continued her work from her hospital bed.

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State Street Bank denies all allegations brought against them by Lam and insists she was fired as "part of planned organizational changes," according to a spokesperson who spoke with the New York Post, who added that "we sympathize with her health situation and wish her well."

Lam tells a very different story, however. In court filings, she claims that those "organizational changes" included just one other termination on her 55-person team besides herself. She alleges her illness was deemed "inconvenient" by superiors.

But even more striking is the nature of the work Lam says she was doing from that hospital bed when she was fired — sounding alarms to State Street Bank of some $1.5 million in excessive billing of worldwide banking clients she'd discovered.

“In the years, months, and weeks before Mrs. Lam’s termination, she constantly notified State Street superiors of the billing and systems failures she discovered on a near-daily basis," her court papers read. Lam says she also discovered that State Street employees were deleting financial records related to her reports.

If her allegations are true, it would not be the first time. State Street Bank was ordered to pay a $115 million criminal penalty in 2021 after being caught running a "scheme to defraud a number of the bank’s clients by secretly overcharging for expenses related to the bank’s custody of client assets," according to the Department of Justice.

Lam's attorney, Shane Seppinni, says he intends to hold State Street Bank accountable too. “State Street refuses to take accountability for illegally firing Mrs. Lam, a 9/11 cancer victim," he said. "So a New York jury will have to teach this trillion-dollar Boston bank a lesson."

Here's hoping it's a lesson that not only other corporations take heed of, but our legislators do, as well. Because it is unconscionable and barbaric that America's worship of capitalism and "work ethic" allows employees to be susceptible to such utterly corrupt indifference in the first place.

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John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.