In the more than two years since the pandemic closed many offices, white-collar employees across the country have been forced to set up desks in cluttered kitchens and cramped bedrooms, reinventing how to work — day in, day out, on the fly.

New social codes developed between employees and employers, perhaps changing the nature of work irrevocably.

Another consequence of the mass relocation of office workers: a rise in employee lawsuits demanding reimbursement for expenses incurred while working from home during the pandemic.

“We have tons of these in the pipeline,” said Jacob Whitehead, an attorney who has filed about 20 class- action lawsuits over business expenses demanded by employees.

Home expenses such as telephone and internet fees, extra energy to heat or cool a house and office supplies can add $50 to $200 a month per employee, according to more than a dozen lawsuits examined by The Times.

If expenses were incurred for the duration of the pandemic, that could add as much as $5,000 for every worker.

Some lawsuits are also demanding payment for the potential revenue employees could have collected had they rented out their home office instead of using it for work.

“This is one of those pandemic-related issues that rose very suddenly,” said Craig Ackermann, a Los Angeles attorney who has filed about 25 lawsuits to collect unreimbursed business expenses from employers. About half of those lawsuits have been settled, he said.

One of Whitehead’s clients, Troy Seppala, a former refinance sales trainer, was among several employees of Better Mortgage Corp. who last month filed a lawsuit against the company.

In the suit, Seppala claimed that after he was ordered to work from home, starting in March 2020, he had to foot the bill for work expenses, including internet use, extra electricity and use of his personal laptop and cellphone, at a total cost of “several thousands of dollars.”

Seppala was laid off from Better Mortgage in December 2021, part of a mass layoff that was executed during a Zoom meeting, and is still looking for work.

Better Mortgage did not respond to emails seeking comment on the case.

In addition to suits over expenses, the tech industry, including companies large and small that offer free meals, dry cleaning and other services meant to improve employees’ lives, has faced criticism from workers after cutting such perks during the pandemic.

Meta, the parent of Facebook, received pushback from employees last month after the digital giant cut free services such as laundry and dry cleaning and made changes to the timing of its free dinner service.

Better Mortgage had paid for snacks and lunch each day for employees who worked in the office — perks that were eliminated when Seppala and other staff members were ordered to work from home.

Seppala said it was already difficult to make ends meet in the high-priced Bay Area. Once he found he had to pay for his daily lunch plus the other office expenses, money began to get tight.

“As soon as we started working from home, I realized how much day-to-day money I really had because of how much went toward paying for that stuff,” he said.

Other lawsuits, many of which are pending, have targeted such corporate giants as Wells Fargo Bank, Liberty Mutual Insurance, Visa, Oracle and Bank of America. Visa declined to comment on the suits; representatives of Bank of America, Liberty Mutual and Oracle did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The companies that are being sued for failing to reimburse employees for business expenses have argued in court that the pandemic caught them off guard and unprepared to respond, according to Ackermann.

“They say it is a one-in-a-hundred-year pandemic — what do you expect?” he said. “Still, the law is the law. Do you think the employee should eat the cost?”

Tiffany Calderon, a treasury service associate at Wells Fargo Bank, filed a lawsuit in August, saying her bosses have failed to reimburse her and other employees for a variety of business expenses since sending them to work from home in March 2020.

Among the expenses are “internet, phone, personal computer, office equipment (printers, scanners, etc.), office supplies, utility bills, and/or fair value for space used as home office,” according to the lawsuit.

Joshua Haffner, Calderon’s attorney, said the expenses have cost her between $100 and $200 a month.

“The cost shouldn’t be shifted to the employees,” he said. “This benefits the business.”

In a statement, Wells Fargo said the bank has given its employees “guidance on how to seek reimbursement for reasonable and necessary expenses resulting from conducting Wells Fargo business at home, such as office supplies and cell phone and internet services, and our policy complies with California law.”

The lawsuits highlight a dramatic change the pandemic brought to the business world: the widespread transfer of employees from business offices to home offices to help minimize the spread of the coronavirus.

In a poll of nearly 6,000 workers by the Pew Research Center, 71% of those employees with jobs that could be done at home were working from home all or most of the time in the fall of 2020. Among those workers, only 23% said they teleworked frequently before the pandemic.

Many employees may be conflicted about suing their employer over home business expenses because despite the added cost, working from home offers many benefits, such as a more flexible schedule and relief from the daily commute.

The legal disputes have arisen because very few employers adopted clear policies about reimbursing workers for work-related expenses at home, according to academics and legal experts.

Federal law does not require companies to pay for expenses incurred by employees working from home, but many states, including California, adopted laws to address the subject long before the pandemic. The California labor commissioner’s office has yet to issue expense reimbursement guidelines specific to COVID-19.

The state’s labor code is tilted to favor workers. The law requires employers to pay for “all necessary expenditures or losses incurred by the employee in direct consequence of the discharge of his or her duties.”

The law describes those expenses as “all reasonable costs, including, but not limited to, attorney’s fees incurred by the employee enforcing the rights granted by this section.”

Once workers were sent home en masse, employers were much more likely to pay for home-office equipment, such as computers, according to a survey of 10,000 Americans directed by Stanford economics professor Nicholas Bloom. But less than 10% of employers reimbursed workers for costs such as new furniture or internet fees, he said.

“For equipment like laptops, webcams, microphones and a work desk, it is reasonable for an employer to pay for this,” Bloom said. “For more general costs like refurbishing a home office, improved broadband or lunch, that is less common and would depend on a case-by-case basis.”

Some companies have adopted policies to address the cost of the new work normal. Early in the pandemic, several tech companies, including Google and Shopify, announced plans to reimburse employees up to $1,000 for work-from-home equipment.

Google recently announced that it was ending its voluntary work-from-home period in the Bay Area and several other locations. The company said it expects most employees to come into the office three days a week and have two days of remote work.