Hi everyone, my girlfriend (we live in Florida) is in college and works as a waitress. It’s worth noting that she lives with her parents and has plenty of money saved up (plus I work and could help her out in an emergency) so money is not a concern here, so if she wanted to quit and find another job she could easily do so without any issue.
When she was first hired, she was told that they just needed somebody to be on-call. She went in her first week for training, and once her training was done, she expected to shift over to just being on-call, but instead she was scheduled for several days. She’s typically scheduled to work at least 3 days of the week, and is on-call for 1 or 2 more. However, her workplace is short-staffed and any day she is on call there’s a 90% guarantee she’s going to have to work, so she always works at least 4 days per week, which is way too much considering that she’s in college and is struggling with some serious mental health issues. She’s basically either sleeping or a zombie when she’s not working.
About a month into her working there, she was woken up in the morning to her manager furious with her for not responding to her texts. Apparently they had changed her schedule to be on-call that day at the last minute, and she didn’t know. She apologized and rushed off to work. When she came home we talked about it and I told her that it concerned me that she apologized, when she did nothing wrong and it’s really her manager who should be apologizing for talking to her that way considering the circumstances. The problem is that she agrees with me that they’re going too far and mistreating her, and she has told me several times she could quit whenever and it wouldn’t be an issue, but she really wants to stick it out because she’s trying to overcome her depression and doesn’t want to be a quitter.
That was months ago. She’s now been there over 6 months and they’ve never done something like that again, until today when they called her and made her come in on her day off. Note that she wasn’t on call today, and was already called in yesterday on a day that she was on call. This means that she’ll likely work a full 40+ hours this week (Monday was a 10 hour day) when she’s supposed to be part time.
I guess I’m simultaneously looking for advice on if it’s legal in Florida for her employer to call her in on a scheduled day off, and also for advice on how to (and if I even should) express to her that she needs to set a hard boundary for her mental health. When she works extra days like this it absolutely wrecks her and she often sleeps for 16-17 hours, and it’s just not healthy to sustain this.