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...
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