my parents called my abusive boss to complain

A reader writes:

I wonder if you could offer your perspective on something I’ve been wondering about for a long time now.

When I was 16 years old, I got my first job. The culture was one that I now recognize as abusive, and teen employees were regularly taken advantage of in some awful ways. At the time, though, it was my only experience with the professional world, and I assumed that much of it was normal.

I had excellent attendance and was always on time, but on one particular day, I was extremely sick — could-not-get-out-of-bed sick. (I would later find out I had scarlet fever, so extremely contagious and potentially dangerous.)

I was scheduled to work that day, so I called in sick for the first time. When I told my boss I was unwell and asked to stay home sick, he loudly mocked me on the phone to other employees and customers. “Joelle says she wants to stay home today. Wouldn’t you have liked to do that? But you came in anyway, didn’t you?” to anyone who would listen. He told me he expected me to come in. Although I definitely shouldn’t have, I felt powerless and intimidated and somehow dragged myself out of bed. On my way out the door, I explained what had just happened to my parents, who were shocked that I was going to work.

Later on during my shift, I was called into my boss’s office. He was furious with me. Apparently, my parents had called corporate to complain about his behavior (and it sounded like his boss had just laid into him). He chastised me for getting my parents to fight my battles for me. I apologized profusely and assured him that I hadn’t asked them to do that and had no idea that they had. I was mortified.

Now, I’m torn. On the one hand, parents should not interfere with their child’s work. On the other hand, his behavior was truly abusive and potentially put others in danger by intimidating sick me into going to work, and I was far too timid as a minor to have pushed back in any meaningful way on my own.

How should my parents have responded?

I can’t take issue with what your parents did!

I wouldn’t encourage parents to call their teenage kids’ employers on their behalf, let alone to lay into their teenager’s boss’s boss, but I have to applaud them in this case.

To be clear, ideally your parents would have stopped you when you were walking out the door and told you not to go into work when you were that sick and then, once you were feeling better, coached you on how to deal with a boss like this — including what is and isn’t okay for an employer to expect and how to handle it when you’re treated the way your boss treated you. That’s the most helpful way to do it, because that teaches the teenager how to handle this stuff themselves.

But it’s also true that an adult in a position of power had just shamed their teenager into going to work with scarlet fever and they were rightly pissed off. I can’t blame them for switching away from “parent of employee” mode and into just “parent” mode.

Parents shouldn’t get involved with the minutiae of their kid’s job, like calling to ask for a schedule change or complaining about an assignment. But sometimes a situation is egregious enough that it’s not unreasonable for a minor’s parent to get involved. And you were still a minor. I’m okay with it.

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