She lifted a box, hurt her back, and got light duty. Then it quietly disappeared
A former Tractor Supply Company warehouse worker says the retailer pushed her out instead of accommodating her back injury - and that HR was the one making the calls.
Barbara Collins filed suit on May 5, 2026 in the United States District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, accusing Tractor Supply of disability discrimination and failure to accommodate under the Americans with Disabilities Act. She is seeking $300,000 on each of two counts, plus back pay and reinstatement.
According to the complaint, Collins started as a Material Handler at the company's distribution center in Macon, Georgia, in or around July 2024. The filing says her performance was strong enough that Tractor Supply tapped her for its "Supervisor in Training" program in early 2025.
On March 6, 2025, the complaint alleges, Collins lifted a box on her shift and felt her back "go out." She told a supervisor what happened. That supervisor, identified in the complaint only as Brian, was covering for one of her regular supervisors that day. According to the filing, Brian responded "do what you can do" and sent her back to the floor. Collins says she worked through the rest of that shift, and the next day, in visible pain.
A worker's compensation claim eventually went through. Doctors diagnosed sciatica, cervical radiculopathy and a herniated disc, the complaint says, and put Collins on restrictions: no overhead work, bending, twisting, or standing or walking more than 30 minutes at a stretch.
Tractor Supply granted a light duty assignment scanning inventory codes and approved the break schedule. By the standards of an ADA case, this is the part the company gets right.
The complaint says the trouble started after that. Supervisors, Collins alleges, began approaching her individually - not the whole shift - to offer "voluntary time off," or VTO. Under company policy, the filing says, VTO is unpaid (unless the employee uses accrued leave) and is supposed to be offered shift-wide when there isn't enough work to go around. Collins claims she was singled out, and that what started as offers became insistence.
On April 16, 2025, Collins alleges, DC Supervisor Chastity Campbell told her she "really need[ed] for [Ms. Collins] to go home." The next morning, the filing says, HR representative Makeba Lawhorn called Collins before her scheduled shift and told her "not to come in," telling her the company "could not afford to pay" her for the light duty work.
Collins stayed home, as instructed. Hours later, the complaint alleges, a different HR representative, Melissa Green, called and repeatedly pressed her on why she had left work the previous day "without telling anyone."
The next day, April 18, 2025, Tractor Supply fired her. The stated reason: she "failed to appear or call in for work." The company later called it "job abandonment." Collins alleges both explanations are false.
For HR audiences, the complaint reads as a checklist of process risks. Tractor Supply's early steps - acknowledging restrictions, setting up light duty, approving breaks - are the kind of moves that usually defeat an ADA claim, not generate one. What the filing alleges came next is what HR leaders should study: an accommodated employee allegedly steered into voluntary leave while colleagues without disabilities kept working; a termination for absence after an HR representative allegedly told the worker to stay home; and, according to the complaint, no fresh interactive process when the original accommodation stopped being honored.
The allegations have not been tested in court. Tractor Supply has not yet filed a response, and no court has ruled on the claims.
