I am an 18 year old girl working at a company that tutors kids math for 12 bucks an hour. I have been working there since January. I am doing it so I can save money for college this year.
There is a candy cabinet at work that the kids can use their little rewards to get stuff from. We are not allowed breaks or eating while on the clock, so it's pretty standard protocol for instructors to take stuff from the cabinet. It was never a big deal until the new boss came. He's a 40 something year old big guy. I took a sour patch one day and was acting surreptitiously as a joke with my coworker. He saw and yelled at me in his office that day. He accused me of being a thief and stealing inventory, and threatened to cut down my hours to nothing and take the stolen candy out of my paycheck. He gave me this super condescending talk about how I needed to take this job more seriously and be more competent, which is fucking infuriating because I have always been good at the job. He has never even done table observation, so how dare he have the audacity to say such a thing?
That was about a month ago. The other day I made a joke to an assistant manager about how I knew I couldn't take the candy, but was there any other way I could obtain it? (idiotic of me, I know). They said I could get the kids to get it for me, if they wanted. So I asked a kid who I am very close with if she wanted to get me a fruit snack at the end of the session. She did. The manager saw it and he got super pissed at me again. He screamed at me and called me a thieving, lying person with no credibility and said that if he wasn't so shortstaffed he would fire me. He said it was a crime akin to embezzlement. I am not making this up. And I was so stunned and I said that the assistant manager had said it was ok. I am not very good at talking in these sort of high pressure situations so I was kind of mumbling a bit and it was just a disaster. He calls the assistant manager in and they denied ever saying that. He then accused me of using them as a scapegoat and lying to cover my “criminal” tracks. And he said he was just complimenting me to his boss and was just thinking he had “knocked some good work” into me with his stupid talk from a month ago, even though, as aforementioned, I have always been a good worker, he just has been too bitchy to ever notice. Now, he says, he is going to put me under review.
I am so miserable. I have given up a lot for this job. I work really hard. I have never missed a day of work, I come in on my off days- many weeks I am working every single day–, I am never late, and most importantly, I am a good teacher and the kids love me a lot. Yet my boss has fabricated this completely skewed impression of me. I have been working since I was 15 years old and I have never been treated as poorly as I have under this new man. I just feel like I deserve more respect, and I want to quit. In the past week, 2 workers have quit and I think he fired 2 other ones. Should I quit?