Fired in Sterling Heights? You need a Sterling Heights employment lawyer who knows the auto-supplier playbook and has tried 50+ cases.
Need a Sterling Heights employment lawyer? Here’s the local landscape. Sterling Heights is Michigan’s fourth-largest city and one of the densest concentrations of auto-assembly and Tier 1 supplier work in the country. Most employment claims here come out of high-volume manufacturing environments where attendance, FMLA, and retaliation issues collide with hard production targets.
What employment cases look like in Sterling Heights
Sterling Heights is the Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly Plant, dense supplier network along Mound Road and Van Dyke, plus a growing healthcare and professional-services base. The disputes that come from this kind of workforce have predictable patterns: FMLA leave requests met with discipline, attendance-policy enforcement that targets workers who took protected leave, and ADA accommodation refusals on the line.
I sit on one side of the table only — the employee’s — and I screen every potential case by a single question: could I win this in front of a jury? That standard means you’ll hear the truth at intake. A real case gets a plan; a weak one gets an honest explanation and a free referral elsewhere.
The eight fact patterns that turn into real claims
Whether you build trucks at an assembly plant, run a line at a supplier, or manage a team in an office off Van Dyke, the Sterling Heights cases I take tend to follow eight recognizable scripts. The linked headings below explain each one in detail.
Wrongful termination
Attendance-point terminations are the signature Sterling Heights firing — and when the points started accumulating only after you got hurt, took leave, or spoke up, the policy is cover, not cause. A stated reason that collapses under scrutiny is what makes the claim.
FMLA retaliation
Plant workers know this sequence: FMLA leave gets approved, and then the discipline starts — points for absences that should have been protected, a demotion, or a termination dressed up as policy enforcement. The federal leave law forbids exactly that, and the short gap between leave and punishment is the evidence.
Pregnancy discrimination
Telling your supervisor you’re pregnant, asking for a line accommodation, or coming back from maternity leave should change nothing about your job. When it triggers a firing, a demotion, or a campaign to push you out, that’s pregnancy discrimination.
ADA accommodation
An employer faced with a medical restriction has a legal duty to consider reasonable adjustments — a different station, modified duties, altered hours. Ignoring the request, denying it out of hand, or firing the worker who made it is an ADA violation.
Race, gender, age discrimination
When the write-ups, the layoff list, or the passed-over promotions track race, gender, or age rather than performance, the law calls it discrimination — and punishing you for complaining about it is a separate violation called retaliation.
Whistleblower retaliation
Report a safety hazard or illegal practice at a plant and get terminated for it, and Michigan’s Whistleblowers’ Protection Act applies. Be aware the statute allows only 90 days to file, one of the shortest deadlines in Michigan employment law.
Non-compete defense
A non-compete doesn’t automatically follow you to your next supplier job. If you’ve been threatened or sued over one, know that Michigan courts enforce these agreements only when they pass a demanding reasonableness test — and many don’t.
Severance review and negotiation
That severance packet on your kitchen table contains a release of every claim you could ever bring. Don’t return it signed until an attorney has reviewed the terms and told you whether you’re leaving money or rights behind.
Where Sterling Heights employment cases get filed
Cases over $25,000 are filed in the Macomb County 16th Circuit Court in Mt. Clemens. The 41A District Court at Metropolitan Parkway hears smaller wage and statutory claims. Federal claims go to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan in Detroit.
I’m in those courts regularly. My office is in downtown Detroit, roughly 30 minutes from Sterling Heights — close enough that in-person meetings are easy when they make sense, and most case work is handled by phone and email between hearings.
The local context
Cases I’ve handled or evaluated involving employees of: Stellantis Sterling Heights Assembly, Magna Powertrain, Henniges Automotive, McLaren Macomb, Henry Ford Macomb.
Callers want to know one thing before anything else: have I gone up against their employer? Among Michigan’s large employers, it’s rare that I haven’t — and having seen how a company’s HR department and defense counsel operate means a new case starts with the strategy half-built.
Free case evaluation. Straight answer either way.
Fifteen-minute call. I’ll ask the right questions, tell you whether your case is worth pursuing, and either explain what I’d do or refer you to someone who can.