Your first job isn’t always going to be perfect, but for most people, it will be a good experience that gives them a taste of their own money.

What would you do if you got a job at a nursing home while you were in high school, but then they said you had to attend mandatory meetings at a time when you were in class?

That is what happened to the young worker in this story, so she tried to explain to them that it would be impossible to attend, but they said they would write her up if she missed the meetings.

Fortunately, she was able to find a new job before things really got bad, but this is a crazy example of how companies often mistreat young employees. Read through the full story below to see exactly what happened.

Got written up for not attending a mandatory staff meeting… that was during school hours

This happened a decade ago but lemme be frank, the healthcare industry has NOT improved that much since lmao.

That sounds like a great first job.

Here’s me at 16-17, bright eyed and having just earned their nursing assistant (CNA) license. In the state where I grew up, you can get your CNA license at 16.

Quite a few kids I went to school with got their CNA because it paid way better than other jobs that you could get at our age. So it wasn’t uncommon in my area for a nursing home to employ a handful of high school kids as CNAs.

How are people supposed to make it to this meeting?

I wound up with a job at a nursing home working second shift, part time. I worked there with a couple of my classmates from school.

This nursing home had quarterly mandatory staff meetings that occurred at 12pm on Wednesdays. There were no alternative times and you were required to attend, even if you worked nights, and the meeting was unpaid.

If you missed it, it was an automatic write-up.

Oh boy, what is going on?

Of course, I couldn’t attend those meetings because I went to high school during the day. I informed the director of nursing when I started that it was impossible for me to attend those meetings.

She said okay, no problem, you won’t get in any trouble. 8ish months go by, I’m enjoying my job and the residents, when one night the DON called me into her office.

Once again, how is she supposed to attend the meetings if she is at school?

She informed me, coldly, that I was on the cusp of being fired because I had two writeups for… missing the mandatory staff meetings.

Now, I was a kid with severe anxiety, so I started panicking immediately. I reminded her that I’d told her that I attended school during the day and that I couldn’t leave school grounds.

So, her boss is lying to her?

She replied that “school is not an excuse for missing these meetings, also you never told me that.”

Gaslit by my own director of nursing, I started crying in her office and apologizing and begging to keep my job.

She will definitely miss the next meeting.

She said “this is just a warning, don’t miss it next time” and dismissed me. I spent the rest of my shift hiding my tears from the residents.

Luckily, I was poached by a home hospice company not long after and the job was much better.

If they write people up for this, they won’t be able to have any of these young employees.

I stuck around in healthcare after that, got my degree, now I’m an independent clinician in private practice.

I recently reconnected with one of my friends/former coworkers from the nursing home job, who informed me that he also got written up for missing the mandatory staff meetings for being in high school!

What an awful place to work.

There was more to this job, like how they didn’t pay me for overtime work I put in or that they put me on night shift when I was still a minor (which is illegal in my home state), but now the nursing home has a bottom-tier ranking and they continuously get bad rankings in state inspections.

They’re probably going to close soon. So maybe justice does exist in the world?

That nursing home is straight up breaking the law. They likely know that these kids wouldn’t ever file an official complaint because they don’t know how, so they didn’t bother doing things properly.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a high school student whose manager insists on scheduling them during school hours.

Check out what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Absolutely ridiculous.

This is the right move.

They lost some great employees that way.

I don’t see how the company can get away with it.

This is is exactly right.

If they aren’t paying you to attend the meeting, they can’t make it mandatory. She should file a complaint with the labor department. What they are doing is straight-up illegal.

Young workers often don’t understand all of their rights, though. That is why companies like this think they can get away with it.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a cashier who was rudely confronted by a teenager, only to have the teen’s father step up in an unexpected way.