By Kade Knuffman

I started at Jarling’s Custard Cup a month or so after my 15th birthday in 2023. I worked from the beginning of March until the middle of May. Many of my peers, all of whom were 14-15, also worked there. During my time, I worked as a “Junior Cupper” and scooped custard to customers. 

I worked from 4-5 PM, after school, almost every school day, until 10:30-11 PM. When asking others who worked at Jarling’s about this, one said “ I had shifts as long as 4PM-Midnight, upwards of 8 hours on school nights, not getting home till past 12 and it really started to affect my sleep schedule, grades and life. Some nights I would get as little as 3 hours of sleep. I dropped 2 whole letter grades in all my classes from when I started working there”. Another worker, who had a more pleasant experience, stated “Some nights were not bad, having 3-4 hour shifts. Some nights, I would get home from school and go to work for like 7 hours”.

According to (820 ILCS 205/3) of the Child Labor Laws, “The hours of work of minors under the age of 16 years e/mployed outside of school hours shall not exceed 3 a day on days when school is in session”. The section also states that “or be so employed, permitted or allowed to work between 7 p.m. and 7 a.m. 

  The times worked were not the only problem, either. The workers were working around 6.5 hours almost every night after school, and upwards of 10 hours for one or both days on weekends.  That is, if you’re working 4 weekdays and 1 weekend, that is around 36 hours. According to (P.A. 102-832) of the Illinois Department Of Labor, “the number of hours worked by the minor outside school in any week does not exceed 24.”

I spoke with other workers about their work experience, to which one said “From the start it seemed like it was a good workplace and environment , my friends had worked there before. Later on, I was being scheduled for way too long. When I got injured I was still scheduled to work (ankle injury, couldn’t walk well, doctor ordered them to not work). Then later on, it got really bad. They started cutting hours because I changed my availability to focus on school, then I got tired of it and left.”. This person had a good experience working with them, but once a problem came up, the managers had an issue letting an employee have time off.

I experienced something similar, I was in the ER at midnight, and didn’t get home until 4 AM. I called in school at an appropriate time, and when I texted my boss about asking for the night shift off, they declined.

When asking another worker about the experience working there, they said  “Being that it was my first job, I was having conflicting feelings about the working conditions as I had never had a job before. At the time, I did not like working there, and now that I have another job, I can see that it was a very negative work environment with some extremely toxic traits. To summarize, it was a very bad work environment and I would not work there again.”

When talking to another worker with a more positive attitude towards the company, to which they simply said ”It wasn’t bad, but I just didn’t like the hours very much”. When asked about their hours, they stated “Some nights were not bad, having 3-4 hour shifts. Some nights,I would get home from school and go to work for like 7 hours”

I reached out to two managers at Jarling’s, asking if they had any interest in talking to me about the topics I planned to talk about, to which I got no response from either.