I encounter more scams and shady behavior from companies when seeking professional career jobs than I did as a student looking/working for regular part time jobs.
When I was a student doing basic, close to minimum wage part time work:
Nobody asked me to work for free and "experience".
Nobody was late on paying their employees.
Nobody tried to evade taxes by misclassifying employees as contractors.
Nobody withheld salary figures and then gave a crazy lowball number.
But the moment I stepped away from basic jobs and into a "lucrative" field all these issues sprung up at least once, some multiple times. Now that is irony.
It's like if a rich neighborhood had a much higher crime rate than a poor one.
had the same shock going from hourly work to "career" roles. suddenly it’s unpaid projects, net 60 pay, 1099 for full time hours, and mystery salary ranges that turn into peanuts. wild how the more “professional” it gets, the more scammy it feels. and yeah, finding real jobs now is stupid hard
This is because so many white collar jobs don’t have employee unions, and historically more blue collar jobs do. People used to be paid well if they were educated and doing white collar work, but that has been slowly going away for decades. But employees in those roles are usually discouraged from organizing even more than low wage workers are. Many people falk for it because they think it will increase their chances of being promoted. Government jobs are more likely than private companies to be unionized, from what I know.
It’s also more of an issue at smaller companies and start ups. I’ve heard plenty of stories about small mom and pop shops and restaurants that break the rules and downs ways to exploit and underpay their retail and service staff. I think that’s less common at huge retail companies and chain restaurants that have internal HR departments, but those jobs are still difficult and can be exploitative.
Blue collar work is not just the trades. If you're age 16-21 and stocking shelves, you're very unlikely to be in a union so union protections can't be the reason they're not getting scammed in their compensation. My paychecks were always predictable and no manager has tried to get me to work extra unpaid hours during a busy season.
Maybe some food franchises allow their restaurant workers to unionize but I'm not too familiar with those jobs as I am with non-food service.
If small mom-and-pop places are more likely to be stingy with their workers, we probably could use more granular statistics to summarize that. With a few exceptions, salary data isn't usually organized by company headcount. Even though it is commonly organized by industry, occupation, YoE and location. If we had more bar charts to summarize where salaries are in <10 employee shops, with 10-100 employees, etc. it can help more people discover that there's still a lot of disparity in compensation even if you narrow it down to specific cities and types of work.
There are certain laws like FMLA that small companies are exempt from. Housekeepers and nannies and domestic laborers are exempt from certain worker protections and benefits. The law alone shows us that it’s easier to exploit workers at small businesses, and people who work in homes. Independent restaurants are known for hiring undocumented immigrants and paying them less than minimum wage because they can threaten to report them to Ice.
They probably do, they just don't get caught (or convicted)