He Filed a Safety Complaint. Three Days Later He Was Fired. Now He's Suing the Carrier and the AI Company.

A fuel-truck driver reported broken equipment. Then he complained about pornographic calendars plastered inside the company trucks he was required to drive. Three days after he refused to sign a write-up generated by a dashcam AI system — a system drivers had been told wasn't being used for routine monitoring — he was fired.

He's now suing both the carrier, Figueroa Tank Lines, and the company that built the AI: Samsara, Inc.

Three Complaints, One Pink Slip, Three Days Apart

The driver hired on with Figueroa on December 1, 2024. Within a few months he was reporting equipment defects to management. He was told he was exaggerating safety risks and pressured to keep driving anyway.

In June 2025, he complained to management — including Kevin Figueroa directly — about pornographic calendars displayed inside company trucks drivers were required to operate. According to his complaint, a Figueroa manager responded:

"You are in an industry full of men, what do you expect?"

No investigation. No corrective action. The calendars stayed.

August 1, 2025: written warning citing cellphone use and a covered camera, generated by Samsara's AI system. August 4, 2025: fired after he refused to sign the write-up.

Three days. That's the timeline a Contra Costa County jury will be asked to evaluate.

The Camera That Was "Not Normally Active"

When Figueroa installed forward and driver-facing cameras in May 2025, drivers were told the system was for accident investigation and safety purposes, was not to be used for routine performance monitoring, was "not normally active," and was subject to strict limits on access, retention, and use.

The complaint tells a different story. Figueroa was allegedly running continuous AI-assisted video analysis through Samsara, generating rolling "distraction incidents" with no connection to any accident or external safety event. That footage, along with driver license numbers, home addresses, and phone numbers, was allegedly accessible to multiple Figueroa personnel through a shared Samsara portal.

The lie is the issue. Not that the camera caught something. That the company told drivers one thing while doing another — and then reached into that secretly gathered footage to build a discipline case three days after a protected complaint.

"We Just Provide the Tool" Won't Fly in California

Garcia's attorneys have a 2024 federal-court blueprint behind them.

On July 12, 2024, Judge Rita Lin in the Northern District of California issued her ruling in Mobley v. Workday, Inc. She dismissed the theory that Workday acted as an "employment agency" but allowed claims to proceed on the theory that Workday acted as an agent of employers. The court's reasoning: Workday qualifies as an agent because its tools "are alleged to perform a traditional hiring function of rejecting candidates at the screening stage and recommending who to advance to subsequent stages, through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning."

This complaint maps directly onto that framework. Samsara's AI generated the incident reports that formed the evidentiary basis for the discipline. That is a classic employer function, not a neutral data service.

Taylor Markey, one of the plaintiff's attorneys and a former EEOC attorney, put it plainly:

"Samsara doesn't just provide a tool to the employer and then walk away."

Samsara's response in its court brief: the complaint "fails to allege that Samsara had any control over, or participated in any adverse employment decision relating to Plaintiff."

That's the argument Workday made. Judge Lin let the case past the pleadings stage anyway.

Samsara's demurrer — its motion to have the claims against it dismissed — is scheduled for a hearing on June 26, 2026. That date matters for everyone in fleet tech, not just Figueroa's drivers.

Samsara Has Been Down This Road Before

This is not Samsara's first fight over whether it bears legal responsibility for what its dashcam data does to drivers.

In Illinois, an appellate court dismissed a 2022 BIPA class action against Samsara after the company required its carrier-customers to certify BIPA compliance before activating facial recognition features — contractually offloading the liability onto the fleet. Clean move, and it worked.

Once. A separate federal court in Illinois refused to dismiss a different BIPA class action against Samsara that same year. In that case, Samsara's Camera ID feature automatically performed facial recognition on a driver, extracting biometric identifiers from his face while he drove and sending them to the Samsara Cloud Dashboard — without his consent to collect or store that data. The court let those claims proceed.

Samsara also argued in Illinois that federal truck safety law preempted state privacy claims entirely. The court rejected that at the pleadings stage.

California's agency theory under FEHA and common law is broader than Illinois's BIPA consent framework. The contractual-indemnification shield Samsara used once in Illinois is not the theory being tested here. Samsara's prior playbook may not transfer.

What This Means If You Drive With a Camera Pointed at Your Face

If the dashcam system in your cab is generating AI incident scores that management can pull at any time, and you have just filed a safety complaint, you now know what that data can be used for.

Company drivers should demand in writing — not just in an orientation meeting — exactly what the system records, how long footage is retained, who inside the company has portal access, and whether the vendor's AI is generating ongoing performance scores or only incident-triggered clips. The gap between what this driver was told and what was allegedly happening is the center of this lawsuit.

Owner-operators aren't off the hook either. If you lease to a carrier that installs a Samsara or comparable system, your data may be flowing through a portal you never agreed to and accessible to people you never vetted.

For carriers who actually want a paper trail that protects them when a retaliation claim surfaces: small fleets using FleetCollect's DQF Compliance Portal are already building timestamped records of driver-reported issues and company responses — the kind of documentation that cuts both ways when a case like this lands in court.

The June 26 Hearing Is the Whole Ballgame

If the court lets the claims against Samsara survive to discovery, plaintiffs' attorneys get access to Samsara's internal records: how the system was configured at Figueroa, who had portal access, what the AI was actually doing versus what drivers were told it was doing.

That discovery process alone changes the math for every fleet tech vendor whose contracts currently read "your data, your problem." Samsara has roughly $500 million in annual recurring revenue and a client list that stretches across virtually every segment of North American trucking. The exposure isn't abstract.

One fuel-truck driver. One lawsuit in Contra Costa County. But the ruling on whether his lawyers can make Samsara answer for it is an industry event. Every ELD company, every dashcam vendor, every AI scoring platform selling into trucking built its legal model on the assumption that "we just provide the data" ends the conversation.

June 26 is when a California court tells them whether that assumption was ever valid.

Photo by Oğuzhan Oğuz on Unsplash