A former Tesla employee claims he was fired after raising complaints about how the extreme heat of his work environment was causing his hearing aids to malfunction.
The man, Hans Kohls, made the allegations in a lawsuit against the Elon Musk owned automaker, which was filed Monday and obtained by The Independent.
Kohls, who is deaf, previously worked at Tesla’s enormous Gigafactory in Austin, Texas, where he was given a job melting aluminum at 1,220 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the reporting. The “extreme heat and moisture” of the casting department, which “far exceed standard industrial heat levels,” the lawsuit said, caused his hearing aids to fail, something that was not only a massive inconvenience, but dangerous: it would be impossible for Kohl to hear alarms and other safety alerts without them.
But when Kohl asked to be reassigned, the suit alleges, Tesla failed to comply with the regulations of the Americans With Disabilities Act and instead fired him.
“The facts of this case are stark and troubling,” Kohls’ attorney Andrew Rozynski told The Independent. “Tesla had a highly qualified employee who requested the most basic accommodation under the ADA, reassignment to a vacant position where he’d already demonstrated success. Instead of complying with the law, they fired him within nine days and told him he was being ‘medically separated.’”
The lawsuit adds to longstanding scrutiny over Tesla’s grueling workplace conditions. Several deaths have occurred at its factories, and the company has been accused of underreporting hundreds of workplace injuries.
Much attention has also been paid to Musk’s personal treatment of employees. He has a history of impulsively firing employees on the spot during his frequent fits of rage, and allegedly threatened to deport an employee who raised a critical safety issue.
Kohls applied for an internship through Tesla’s START program for training candidates to work technical jobs at the company in February 2024, the lawsuit said. He had previously worked in an industrial environment at another job, so when he was asked in an interview whether he would still be able to work in a hot environment after the interviewer noticed his hearing aid, he answered yes.
But “neither the application nor the interview disclosed that the Casting Department’s extreme heat and humidity conditions would far exceed standard industrial heat levels,” the lawsuit stated. Adding to the feeling of deception, Kohls was first sent to work at different departments at the Texas Gigafactory where conditions were much cooler. In other words, nothing Tesla had him train for prepared him for the extreme heat he would face when he was assigned to the casting department.
Kohls soon filed a transfer request in June 2024 to Tesla HR, asking to be sent to another position where his hearing aids could still function, a form of disability accommodation that’s obligated by the ADA, the suit argues. Instead, Tesla insisted that no other jobs were available — which the suit says is untrue — and that the START program “prohibited transfers.” Nine days later, Kohls was fired, and was told he was being “medically separated.”
“By characterizing the termination as ‘medical separation,’ Tesla revealed it was terminating Mr. Kohls because he had a disability that required accommodation — not for any legitimate, non-discriminatory reason,” reads the suit.
Kohls is demanding that he be reinstated to a new position at Tesla and is asking a judge to declare the automaker in violation of the ADA and the Texas Commission on Human Rights Act, according to The Independent.
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