Nursing Assistant Was Given Five Visits in a Town Where White Coworkers Got More Than 135 — She Complained and Was Fired in Two Days, Regulators Say

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A certified nurse assistant took a job expecting the usual grind of in-home care: long drives, tight schedules, and the constant push to pick up enough visits to make the week work. Instead, she says she got quietly boxed out of work in one specific town while her white coworkers were sent there again and again.

That allegation is now at the center of a federal lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against Mid-Michigan Home Health & Hospice LLC, laid out in the agency’s announcement. The EEOC says the company assigned visits based on race and then fired the Black employee shortly after she complained.

The assignments were the job — and that’s where the split showed up

Mid-Michigan Home Health & Hospice provides in-home bathing assistance to clients in central Michigan. For a CNA, getting scheduled for visits is the work: it’s the hours, the pay, the routine, and the chance to build steady relationships with clients.

The EEOC says the company hired a Black female CNA in April 2023. Not long into her employment, she allegedly noticed she wasn’t being sent to patients in Grand Blanc, Michigan—an area where other staff were getting frequent assignments.

In a business where schedules can change daily, a single week might not mean much. But the lawsuit describes a pattern that was hard to miss once it piled up over time: the CNA was sent to Grand Blanc five times in two months, while three white employees were sent there more than 135 times.

Then came the explanation that shouldn’t have been said out loud

There are plenty of reasons a scheduler might shuffle visits—client preferences for days and times, geographic routing, availability, last-minute cancellations. The EEOC says this wasn’t that.

According to the lawsuit, Mid-Michigan avoided sending the Black CNA to Grand Blanc and told her the residents there were “old-time” and “did not care for black people.” It’s the kind of statement that turns an uncomfortable pattern into a direct claim: work was being assigned around assumed—or stated—customer bias.

The EEOC’s regional attorney, Kenneth Bird, put it bluntly: “Customer preference is not a defense to race discrimination.” In other words, even if some clients were biased, the law doesn’t give an employer a pass to route jobs around race.

Three visits disappeared — and the complaint clock started

The lawsuit doesn’t describe a slow, months-long HR process after the CNA raised concerns. It describes a fast-moving chain reaction.

The EEOC says the CNA complained after three Grand Blanc assignments were taken off her schedule and given to a white employee. For someone already seeing a lopsided pattern, that kind of change can feel like the company confirming, in real time, what she’d been trying to ignore.

Then came the part that tends to scare workers into silence: the EEOC says she was fired within 48 hours of complaining. That tight window—two days—is central to the agency’s retaliation claim, because it suggests the complaint and the termination were connected.

Regulators didn’t just investigate — they filed suit

The EEOC says the alleged conduct violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the federal law that prohibits racial discrimination and retaliation. This wasn’t framed as a misunderstanding about scheduling preferences; it was framed as discriminatory job assignment and punishment for speaking up.

The case is filed as EEOC v. Mid-Michigan Home Health & Hospice LLC, Case No. 2:26-cv-10632, in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The agency also noted it attempted to resolve the matter before litigation through its administrative conciliation process—a step where the EEOC tries to reach a settlement before going to court.

The lawsuit announcement also makes clear how the government sees this: if an employer routes work away from a Black employee to satisfy biased customer preferences, that’s still discrimination. And if an employee is fired quickly after complaining about that discrimination, the retaliation claim gets sharper, not softer.

What people zeroed in on: schedules, receipts, and timing

Even without a comment thread attached, this kind of case tends to make people focus on the parts that can be proven without anyone needing to read minds: calendars, dispatch logs, text messages, and who got what work.

The numbers in the EEOC’s description are the kind that stand on their own. Five visits versus more than 135 isn’t a “maybe the routes just worked out that way” gap. It’s the sort of disparity that makes people immediately ask: who kept the schedule, who approved it, and what records show how those assignments were decided.

Timing matters, too. “Fired within 48 hours” is the kind of detail that makes workers think about documentation—when the complaint was made, how it was made, whether it was in writing, and whether management acknowledged it. In workplaces where scheduling is everything, even a simple screenshot of a changed calendar can become a key piece of the story later.

A home-health job can turn into a pressure test overnight

In-home care is already a job where workers often feel they have to absorb whatever comes at them—awkward client comments, last-minute cancellations, unpredictable routes—because they need the hours. The EEOC’s lawsuit sketches a different kind of pressure: being told, directly, that a community wouldn’t want you because of your race, and then watching your schedule reflect that message.

For the CNA, the alleged result wasn’t just insult. It was work withheld, assignments shifted away, and then termination shortly after she protested. For the company, it’s now a federal court fight over whether it used race to decide who got sent where, and whether it fired someone for objecting.

The case now sits where these stories tend to land when nobody backs down: in court, with scheduling records and internal communication likely to become the most important witnesses in the room.