vtsnowedin wrote: She worked her way up to store manager but the salary came with extra unpaid hours that made the raises insignificant.
That's the great American corporate trick.
At IBM, when I started about 40 years ago, my original letter stating the terms of my employment said I'd receive my hourly wages for a 40 hour week, and time and a half for overtime.
Which seemed perfectly fair and normal to me.
Then less than a year later they promote me, and suddenly, I'm on "salary" and NO overtime applies unless there is some formally approved "task pay" for massive overtime over several months or more. Which is something they failed completely to point out to ANYONE who started below a formal salaried position which was almost everyone taking their first full time job.
And I kid you not, when my manager told me I was promoted, he said I "could work all the overtime I wanted to", since he'd restricted me to 5 hours a week after I blew up the department budget working 90 hours a week for months to get my first "critical" project done on time (it was four months behind when I arrived).
Then, a few more promotions, and there is no more task pay no matter what, but the level of responsibility and complexity and stress with the job is HUGE compared to what it was before, with each promotion. (But the pay increases are rather minor, in comparison).
For successful younger folks who have skills but little long term loyalty to any one corporate employer, I can't blame them. The corporations earned that lack of loyalty, generally. The book "White Collar Sweatshop" showed me that at the time I read it in the mid 90's, that there were about 80 million white collar US workers experiencing similar deterioration of job conditions and massive overtime expected as I saw a lot of at IBM, in all sorts of industries.
https://www.amazon.com/White-Collar-Swe ... 039332320XObviously, there may be exceptions, especially with smaller privately held firms where management treats employees well (like IBM generally did, before 1993 and the new Gerstner era of cutting costs is always priority one).
It's amazing how much the workplace can change for most workers over the course of a decade, much less several decades.
The last massive change in the early to mid 90's was largely due to fast global networks (for big computers, not the internet being common yet) -- that massively changed the supply/demand dynamics for lots of tech workers, which has spread since as tech. has spread.