I was somehow not aware of how absurdly much my boss was asking of me for little compensation until a few years ago, and it got more pronounced and obvious during covid.
I've been at my job for the majority of my working life, since I was 22, in 2008. I was hired for 12.50/hour (in a major city) and I currently make 16.50/hour (last raise was 2 or 3 years ago). I have no benefits and only 5 vacation days and 2 sick days a year. Minimum wage here is 15/hour.
The job is for an increasingly small company. When I started, there were 30+ employees, I was one of 2 or 3 for the past 7 years, and then I've been the only employee (most of the time) since 2020. I keep many parts of the business running entirely by myself and have a number of areas of specialized skill and knowledge necessary for the job that would be very difficult to train others in (in addition to doing a lot of time-consuming, tedious small stuff to keep things running).
At the very start of covid, in March or 2020, my boss laid me off and I started back on the clock in September of 2021. I was making more money on unemployment than at my job and had health insurance for a while (finally), and that was all great. However, my boss expected me to do a huge amount of work for him while I was “laid off,” and later kept talking like I was slacking for a year and a half, even though I worked for him consistently in a part time capacity the whole duration. Many, many thousands of dollars of free work. He also claimed, at this time, that he would have to pay back what unemployment paid me, which is just untrue.
Also for several months during my “laid off” period, my boss hired a remote part timer suddenly, wanting him to do some of the more complex work I do. Despite being immediately annoyed that I was doing free work for him while he was able to hire someone new, I was glad for someone else to take on some of these meticulous projects. This new guy was super nice but not experienced in the particular area of work he was hired for. My boss expected me to train him and review his work (again, while not paying me, and also while I was already doing a lot of additional free work for him) and, when his work kept not being up to our standards, I had to extensively correct it.
The complications: I'm very attached to my job, care a lot about it, get a lot of personal meaning from it, find it interesting, and feel a sense of duty to the material I work with (if not necessarily the company). There is also a lot of flexibility with my hours/schedule and, through my job, I have free access to computers and software that I would not otherwise, and that I can use, on the side, for my creative work. However, the job also is sometimes highly emotionally/psychologically stressful and draining to the point that I feel like I have no space away from it mentally and it colors my whole life and all of my time.
The business and my boss have made it last through many massive challenges, and my boss fought major health issues last year, so, while I wanted to quit then, I felt like I couldn't until he was stable again. Now he is and I am trying to square away some of the projects I care about finishing and tie up loose ends in preparation for trying to change jobs, though I'm honestly afraid of the change, since this is pretty much all I know.
I think I just needed to type this out to make sense of things in a space where it was alright to do so and where I might get feedback. I'm so used to my situation with work that I still keep feeling like maybe I'm being ridiculous in thinking I'm being taken advantage of there.