<prompt> Human: My apologies in advance for the poor formatting, still trying to work out a perfectly formatted post but am hoping to get some feed back on this issue if I can sooner than later!For the past four months Ive been working for an awesome interior design company here in California as a contractor, my pay rate was 20hour. Recently the owner of the company offered me a permanent position with salary based pay which basically breaks down like this. In the contract I signed earlier this month she states that Im being offered a full-time position of 25hour 30 hours per week. In other words Im being paid 1500 semi-monthly to work 30 hours each week. Awesome, this offers me the ability to work six hours a day 10:00am - 4:00pm and still find other work after that to make some extra money. Heres where things get tricky, because of the nature of our work lots of art design, long and tedious installations of pieces of art for various clients located all over our area I often end up working anywhere from 35 - 45 hours each week. My boss has told me flat out that I am not going to be paid for hours I work beyond 30 hours per week 5 to 15 hours generally, at the end of my shift today my weekly total was 47.5 hours She then referenced the early stages of her own career in which she often found herself working beyond the hours agreed upon in her own salary and was never compensated for the extra hours and that thats just the way it is when youre starting out. Is this true, am I going to be working for free after I put in 30 hours a week? We rarely ever have such a little amount of work to the point where Id be working 30 hours or less per week. Thank you SO much in advance for any help or advice you can lend! Ive attached a copy of the contract I signed with all personalsensitive information redacted:  <response>: Well, youre basically being paid 16.70hr if you work 45 hours at that rate. Id recommend looking for a new job, because whatever discussion you have with the owner is probably not going to sit well. She most likely put that youd work 30 hours so she wouldnt have to give you benefits. Not sure on the legality of that, but even if it is illegal youll be in a pretty bad position if you challenge her on it.Situations like this are why its good to have a large savings buffer. Assuming you dont have a big chunk of savings to live on for awhile, youre basically trapped until you find something else. If you do have a buffer fund you could discuss this with the owner and risk her getting mad. Point out that you agreed to 30 hours a week, so requiring 45 now drops it down to you making less than you were as a contractor. Adding 15 hours a week is the equivalent of cutting your hourly pay by 13. Try negotiating your workload to be 30 hours, but mention that OCCASIONALLY, but not every week, you dont mind putting in a few extra hours. 