Suit claims HR leaned on hunches, uneven rules and a shaky safety call to force her out
A veteran Texas warehouse worker says Coca-Cola's Southwest bottler pulled her forklift certification, then her job, over medication she had safely taken for a decade.
That is the heart of a lawsuit filed on April 20, 2026, against Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages LLC in the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas, Abilene Division. Lisa K. Duran, who worked at the company's Abilene facility for more than ten years, accuses her employer of disability discrimination, failure to accommodate, retaliation and wrongful termination under the Americans with Disabilities Act, along with interference and retaliation under the Family and Medical Leave Act. The filing in Duran v. Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages LLC, No. 1:26-cv-00188, lays out eight counts in all.
Duran says she has chronic foot problems that have required multiple surgeries and long-term prescription pain medication. For more than a decade, she says, she did her job without incident while taking the same medicine. Her supervisor knew, she says, and never raised a safety or performance issue.
That changed, according to the filing, in December 2024. Days after she took two complaints to HR, her supervisor flagged her medication and her steel-toe footwear as safety concerns. Duran says she voluntarily surrendered her forklift license at that point, bought steel-toe shoes and kept doing the rest of her job.
What followed, she claims, was a slow squeeze. HR accused her of wearing the "wrong type" of steel-toe shoes, she says, even as coworkers wore similar footwear without issue, and issued her a "discussion tracker" for rules that went unenforced elsewhere. She filed more complaints in January and May 2025. Each time, she says, her supervisor circled back to her medication.
HR then asked her doctor to clear her for forklift work. The physician, according to the filing, said only that the medication "might not" be safe for forklift use, imposed no restrictions and did not find her unable to do her job. On June 1, 2025, the company removed her forklift certification anyway, gave her 30 days, and warned of unpaid leave and termination unless she produced an accommodation she says she did not need.
Duran says the company refused to discuss reassignment or modified duties. She took FMLA leave to try changing medications, which her doctor said was not medically workable. When she returned in February 2026, she alleges, the company would not put her back in her old role or an equivalent one, kept her on unpaid leave and set her termination for April 20, 2026.
For HR leaders, the allegations read like a checklist of familiar pitfalls: leaning on hunches instead of individualized medical evidence in safety calls, enforcing dress-code and conduct rules unevenly, and fumbling the handoff when an employee returns from FMLA leave. None of it has been tested in court. Coca-Cola Southwest Beverages has not yet responded, and the claims remain unproven.
