This happened a decade ago but lemme be frank, the healthcare industry has NOT improved that much since lmao
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.
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.
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. 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. She replied that “school is not an excuse for missing these meetings, also you never told me that.” Gaslit to hell by my own director of nursing, I started crying in her office and apologizing and begging to keep my job. 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. 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!
There was more to this hell 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 their asses handed to them in state inspections. They're probably going to close soon. So maybe justice does exist in the world?