Understanding how profitable my company was and the difference in pay between me and my peers helped me understand some bullshit. I'm gonna go over a few things.
1: New hires were consistently getting paid more than existing employees and they don't match seniority pay to the fresh person coming in. Same when I got hired. I got paid $5 an hour more than my mentor at 31/hr. I learned that many senior employees left the company over pay concerns right before I was hired. Took a while for that to sink in and bug me that I'm getting paid more than the people who knew what they were doing. They'll ask you not to compare wages. Fuck that. Compare them. Even if you're on the upper end for the company.
2: We were significantly undermanned and overworked and its fairly normal for me to work between 70-85 hours in a week. I asked how this was even sustainable for the company for the overtime they pay until I realized how much money we made for the company.
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I found that the services I provide will typically cost anywhere between 5-8 times the expense of what I'm paid and the travel and parts and material used for the site (which gets charged to the customer anyways). One particular rough week I found that I single handedly made my company $25k for services while I got paid $2.8k pre-tax. I understand some pay goes to people up the chain and back to the company and for the cost of company insurance but that's still a huge fucking discrepancy.
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Finally started talking to similar workers for other companies and found that I'm making less than half of some of them for what they made. The range was $40-80 an hour. Granted some of them were in a higher cost of living area but still significantly better pay after accounting the difference in the commute.
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My company says we're not doing enough for the manning that we have. They're really wringing us for what we're worth and I'm just simply burnt out (Yes I told them that and they had the gall to tell me I'm being unfair to my peers who are also burnt out)
I'm job hunting with what little time I have and have interviews set on the days I have PTO scheduled. Gonna put in my 2 weeks notice as soon as I got a new job sorted out.
Know what you're worth. We aren't fucking slaves.
Big end note: corporate transactions are fucking atrocious and the minimum wage should be 30 for where inflation truly is. Practice solidarity, the lower and middle classes should be angry.