A former supervisor at a Tesla battery distribution warehouse claims she was fired after flagging “potentially deadly working conditions” that put workers’ lives at risk, according to court filings reviewed by The Independent.
In a complaint filed initially in state court and removed to San Francisco federal court on Thursday, ex-Tesla Energy regional manager Nina Mirani describes the company’s Hayward, California facility, or, “hub,” as dangerously overcrowded and “ripe for a potentially catastrophic fire.”
Tesla Energy, under the tutelage of the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, is the electric carmaker’s sustainable energy division, manufacturing, selling and installing photovoltaic systems, such as their “Powerwall” and “Solar Roof” products, to commercial and residential customers.
Mirani’s complaint says higher-ups “regularly overstocked… hubs with batteries for Tesla power walls, creating unsafe and potentially deadly working conditions.” With insufficient space to properly store them, the lithium-ion cells were stacked in the aisles and against walls, forcing workers, including forklift operators, to navigate “dangerously confined pathways” while carrying “high-voltage material,” the complaint contends.
Although Mirani “repeatedly” warned her bosses about it, they “disregarded [her] legitimate safety concerns and continued to send large amounts of high-voltage batteries to the… facility,” according to the complaint. At the same time, the filing alleges, “large amounts of hazardous material were being delivered into the buildings, compounding the dangers of the buildings being over capacity.”
A lithium-ion battery fire creates its own oxygen, burns extremely hot, and can produce a self-perpetuating chemical reaction known as thermal runaway, all of which make it extremely hard to extinguish one. In 2024, a Texas man behind the wheel of a Tesla Cybertruck burned to death in a fire after rolling the SUV into a ditch, its lithium-ion batteries burning with such ferocity, the driver’s bones literally disintegrated.
In many instances, there is little firefighters can do other than wait for a lithium-ion battery blaze to burn itself out.
Last year, a series of Tesla battery storage systems at a solar facility in Nevada caught fire twice within 30 days. A Tesla lab in Palo Alto recently also saw two battery fires within a month, the latter shutting the facility down for three weeks. Tesla’s vehicle manufacturing plant in Fremont has experienced numerous fires over the past decade, a battery storage unit powering a Tesla electric vehicle charging station in a San Marcos shopping center unexpectedly went up in flames last month, and the company in November recalled 10,000 Powerwall 2 battery units due to elevated fire risks.
No battery fires at Tesla’s hub in Hayward have been publicly reported.
A Tesla spokesperson and company attorney did not respond on Friday to requests for comment.
Mirani began working at Tesla in January 2019, on the automotive side of the business, her complaint states. In 2023, she was transferred to Tesla’s energy storage division, it says.
Later that year, Mirani was given responsibility for overseeing two of Tesla’s energy distribution hubs, which, the complaint explains, are “large warehouses that receive residential power walls [sic] containing high-voltage lithium-ion batteries, along with solar panels and other components directly from international and national suppliers to be distributed to warehouses for pickup by local installers.”
At the hub in Hayward, which the complaint says was the “primary intake location” for Tesla Powerwalls, Mirani’s duties consisted largely of making sure everything was stored safely.
But, the complaint continues, management paid no mind to Mirani’s continual pleas to thin out the battery inventory or risk burning the entire facility down.
In the fall of 2024, Mirani delivered a PowerPoint presentation to one of the top bosses at Hayward, raising “significant safety concerns” about battery overcrowding at the hub.
She told him that the frenetic volume of incoming battery products to be stored, along with a comparatively slower outflow of orders, “created conditions ripe for a potentially catastrophic fire, placing… employees at serious risk,” the complaint states. Mirani followed up with a walk-through of the Hayward hub, pointing out the various ways in which she believed worker safety was being jeopardized.
Still, no matter how many times Mirani spoke up, bringing her concerns to multiple superiors, nothing changed, the complaint alleges.
Finally, in mid-February 2025, Mirani asked someone from Tesla’s Systems Development Team to spend a week shadowing her team to see for himself the concerns she had been raising, the complaint states.
The systems exec highlighted all of the same things as Mirani, who asked her direct boss for permission to hire badly needed additional staff “to address and offset the immediate and compounding issues,” according to the complaint.
But, it maintains, Mirani’s boss shot her down, telling her instead to “work with the systems department to come up with better systems.”
“Thereafter, [Tesla’s]’ factory ramped up production and [Mirani’s] teams received a flood of high-voltage batteries at the hubs,” the complaint says.
Mirani voiced her deepening fears about having far too many batteries onsite, but was instructed to “make them fit,” according to the complaint. Increasingly worried, Mirani went to her boss’s boss, who agreed to visit the hub within two weeks time, the complaint states.
Three days later, Mirani was fired.
According to her complaint, Mirani was told that she had been terminated for performance issues, and that “several shipments” had been lost under her watch. However, the complaint calls this a pretext, noting that Mirani “maintained a consistent track record of excellence for the entirety of her tenure, demonstrated by glowing performance reviews,” regular raises, and three performance-based awards in 2024 alone.
Additionally, no “missing” shipments ever appeared in the fulfillment team’s tracking system, and were never mentioned again after Mirani’s firing, which the complaint says is confirmation “that no such error had ever occurred.”
Aside from Mirani, two other Tesla employees who had also spoken out about safety issues at the Hayward hub were terminated the same day, according to the complaint. At the same time, it says the one employee on Mirani’s team who never raised his voice about anything safety-related was spared.
Mirani’s complaint says she has suffered humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional distress, and is seeking general, compensatory, and punitive damages to be determined at trial.
Tesla, for its part, says in a motion to dismiss that the employment agreement Mirani signed when she took the job directs all workplace claims to mandatory arbitration.
The company also argues that Mirani’s job was “at will,” that there existed “legitimate, non-retaliatory reasons for the alleged acts of… which [Mirani] complains,” and that “any symptoms of mental or emotional distress or injury… were the result of a pre-existing psychological disorder or alternative concurrent cause, and not the result of any act or omission of Defendants.”
An initial case management conference is set for June 1.
Source: independent.co.uk