Basically what's happening is this
http://www.moreawesomethanyou.com/smf/index.php/topic,20877.0.html , but instead of keeping my teenager sims from school it is keeping them from going to their part-time jobs. Most recent occurrence was after my teen sim was late to work because of a routing failure. (Her mother is in the Daycare profession and a toddler would not move from the door in time.) She hadn't missed work entirely, and I had already told her to go to work manually. Her older brother, who is already an adult, came to scold her for missing work so she dropped the "go to work" action, making her even later, and then her brother grounded her so she couldn't go to work at all that day or the next.