I've always worked mom and pops shops and was taken advantage of 110%.
Now I work for a startup as an information security analyst and it seems that the sky is the limit here.
Corporations take advantage too. At BOC Edwards OT was only an additional $0.10/hr on top of hourly wage. It is (or was) a Canadian Company and that policy was established in the 70s.
Many tech jobs (including some I have mentioned in my initial post) expect you to perform tasks outside of your defined job scope. They tell you to follow documented specifications but when you inform them the requested tasks are not part of your specifications they say you aren't a team player and hard to work with. If you perform any task that is not a documented specification and it results in costing the corporation a serious amount of money you can be fired.
I have had to stand up to management before for 200 of my peers who felt intimitated to take their breaks that were mandated by law. Management would try to coerce them (my peers) into thinking because they didn't have coverage for the tasks they were expected to perform, that it somehow fell on their shoulders and not Management's. I had to call out the big boss in front of a group of 70 and let him know what his management staff was doing and read the laws as well as the corporate policies aloud.
Also, there is this push for equal pay for women right now, but these corporations don't even provide equal pay for men. Some peer groups have different shift managers and each shift manager decides meritocracy, separately. A fair manager will base meritocracy on job performance. An unfair manager will make sure who he/she likes gets what he/she wants them to get regardless of their job performance and undercut everyone else.
This is what happens when a sector has no union and management is ran by
Peter Principal level talent whom have apparently forgotten that outside company property they are just mere mortals as well; when you forget to follow the golden rule it's hard to say what someone is capable of and what the effect will be.
