I graduated from a vocational school in 2007 where I held my first job in the field as a silversmith/metal spinner. I was started at $8/hr and over the next 7 years, in 2014, was at a rate of $15.50 an hour.
The last year I worked there, I had to get a second job at gamestop to make a little extra money, so that I could go back to school for engineering. This was while I was working 50+ hours a week for this guy.
I was doing everything in that shop from material prep, spinning, silversmithing, and finish work/packing. The older man I worked with was making about $30/hr(semi retired, worked only one day a week). I found this out and immediately asked for a raise.
2 weeks passed and the owner and his wife(she would work for 3 hours daily and then leave) rejected my request for the raise, which irked me in the worst way. I applied and got accepted for the engineering program, which wouldn't affect the hours worked, since I was going to be taking afternoon/night courses, so they didn't need to know at the time.
A few weeks after applying for my courses, he came into the shop after fighting with his wife and started yelling at me(after I had already worked 55 hours that week). I stopped what I was doing and said to him, “You don't get to speak to me like that.”
Him and his wife pulled me into the office, after rejecting a raise, rejected supplying me with insurance, and working me 50 hrs or more a week, and the first thing that came out of his wifes mouth was, “it seems like you haven't wanted to work the past few weeks,” basically insinuating that I was slacking off.
I turned to both of them and said, “You accuse me of slacking off when both of you dont come in on Mondays or Fridays, you come in at 11am and leave at 1pm, you delegate all of the work to me, and try to say I am in charge when you are gone, yet you micromanage everything, and I can't even hand out work to the other guys, because you have to call them and tell them what to do. You know that I do more here than anyone else, and with better precision, yet pay me less than half of what you pay them, and on top of that know that I had to get a second job to supplement income that I don't have coming from here. The fact that my pay from a retail establishment is almost what I make here, shows that you are just here to fuck me.”
They called me at 5pm that day to tell me they couldn't afford to employ me while I was in school and had a second job(tbh I dont know how they knew I was going to college). For reference, 1 job he gets yearly pays out over $100k
Fast forward to today. This man brings me jobs to machine, and if the job takes 15 minutes, he still has to pay a shop minimum of 1 hour of labor, which is $100. If he was more reasonable when I worked for him, I may feel obligated to cut him some slack and tell him for cash, I'd do it for $20.
I know my worth, and it definately isn't work sacrificing my sanity.