Some people definitely aren't in a position to fight back. If you're living paycheck to paycheck and barely getting by, your employer might know that you can't afford to be out of a job for any length of time. Then, they might abuse you because what are you going to do? Fight back, get fired, and then become homeless? Nope. You'll take whatever your employer dishes out on you.

Other people are in a position to fight back. I'm lucky enough to be one of those people. I watched my father waste his life doing extra work that he didn't get paid for. He'd go in early, bring stuff home to work on late into the night, and bring extra work home for the weekends. It's not like he was paid extra. He was salaried and was paid the same if he worked 40 hours or 80 hours.

In the end, he was fired when he was close to 60 - too early to retire, but too old to find a new job because he would likely retire soon. So he retired before he was ready and now lives on a very limited income.

When I got my current job, I was asked to check a generic "info@" email inbox. No problem. I routed the emails to people who could address them. My boss called me in one day to tell me that he expected me to check this inbox at night and over the weekends too.

Now, I'm Jewish and observe the Sabbath. My boss said "I can't tell you to violate your religious beliefs, but I REALLY need you to check this every few hours every day!" I told him that I wasn't going to check it on nights or weekends. He insisted I needed to because someone might email with a medical emergency. (Without getting into my employer, it was plausible that someone would email us about medical stuff in general.) I told him that if someone was having a medical emergency and, instead of dialing 911, they emailed our "info@" mailbox, they deserved to have their emergency wait until Monday morning. In all the time i monitored the inbox, I only got one email that was even slightly an emergency (and even then, it was more of a safety concern than an actual emergency).