High School Student Gets Reprimanded By Their Boss For Being Unable To Cover A Shift Scheduled During School Hours
Why is a boss' inability to use common sense when scheduling the employee's problem?
GaudiLab | Shutterstock For all but the lucky few, getting a part-time job in the afternoons and weekends in high school is something of a rite of passage. But of course, that whole "afternoons and weekends" thing is key — high school kids have to go to school during the day. It's right there in the phrase "high school kids."
You'd think this would go without saying, right? Not so for one high school student on Reddit, who's landed in hot water because of their boss's seeming inability to honor the basic facts of their ability.
A high school student has been scheduled to work during school hours multiple times and is now in trouble for refusing to do it.
The Redditor wrote into the r/anitwork subReddit to get advice on what they should do about their very strange — and very ridiculous — dilemma.
Several months ago, their boss scheduled them for a full eight-hour shift smack in the middle of the day. Which is, you know, typically when high school students are down at the local high school, doing HIGH SCHOOL.
Now, the 16-year-old is in this situation again. "I was scheduled to work this Monday from 1pm-9:30pm." Obviously, that's not going to work for a teen. But when they spoke to their boss about it, they got nowhere.
The student was told they'd have to find someone to cover their shift and was told they'd be punished for not showing up.
"I told my boss I had school and she responded by asking me to find a cover," the student wrote. It's hard not to feel like this boss is just taking advantage of the fact that this person is so young because few older people with workplace experience under their belts would even tolerate this notion.
Why is it their responsibility to fix a mistake their boss made — a mistake they could only have made purposefully because they didn't want to do the work of figuring out a schedule that honors everyone's needs?
Sure, coordinating tons of employees' availability is no small task, but you can't just ask a kid to skip school and then put the onus on them to fix it for you!
But that's what the boss did. When it inevitably blew up in her face, she tried to make it the student's problem again. "Today (the monday I was meant to work) I get messaged during school at 9:30am asking if I could come in for 5:30-9:30pm shift," the student wrote.
They refused because they'd already made after-school plans based on not having to work that day. The boss "responded by saying I had to come in, and if I didn't, I would be marked as a no-show. I feel like this isn't fair," the student wrote. I made plans around what my boss had told me."
Obviously, the boss' inane scheduling for this high school student isn't fair, but it's also illegal in some states.
The Fair Labor Standards Act, a federal law, limits the number of hours and times that minors can work. Fourteen and 15-year-olds are limited to non-school hours only, three hours of work on a school day, and 18 hours total in a school week.
This means that the teen's first time being scheduled during school hours was a violation of federal labor law, as they were only 15 at the time. Now that they're 16, however, all bets are off. The federal government, unfortunately, does not regulate the work hours of employees over 16, and this teen's lazy boss is surely taking advantage of that lack of oversight.
However, many states do regulate working hours for minors regardless of age. So it may be the case that this teen still has legal recourse, and several Redditors urged them to contact the local labor board to find out the rules and file a complaint. They also urged them to have their parents contact an attorney if necessary.
Child labor laws are also under legislative attack in many states as violations are rising.
Unfortunately, illegal practices like this teen has experienced — and far worse ones — are on the rise. The U.S. Department of Labor reported a 14% increase in child labor violations between 2022 and 2023, in fact.
This comes amid attempts to dismantle child labor laws and protections across the country. Twenty-eight states have attempted to pass legislation weakening child labor laws since 2021, and 12 have actually passed them. Efforts to erode child labor protections are also a cornerstone of the Republican Party's Project 2025 agenda.
These laws, which are often proposed and passed under the guise of "career education" opportunities, seek to eliminate breaks and meal periods for kids, and even allow them to go back to working dangerous, toxic jobs like mining as they did back in the bad old days of the 1800s and early 1900s that inspired the push for child labor protections in the first place.
Casting this teen's boss as some kind of mustache-twirling child labor supervillain is surely overwrought, but they certainly don't seem to care anything about this kid's needs or the law where child labor is concerned.
Perhaps the best course of action for this teen is to simply find a different job and take this as a lesson for the future. As one Redditor put it, "Take this vow, 'I will NOT work for jerks, EVER!' Can you tell that I have worked for far too many?"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.