Employers have an awful lot of power. My woman is a school counselor. She's been working there 35 years, and has tenure. But even so, they can transfer her to another school and stick her in a class full of 5 year olds, and she couldn't say a thing. The one thing they can't do is fire her without cause (but it's awfully easy to trump up charges and she has a dick principal now who is trying to do just that in a thinly-disguised case of reverse discrimination). They can't cut her pay either. The reverse discrimination is a clique of blacks basically conspiring to eliminate all the non-black folks from any positions of authority. That's extremely hard to prove though, and they've left enough token whites (at the bottom of the pay scale of course) to cover themselves. So, my woman said fuck it, she's retiring after this year. It's a brutal urban area anyway, and I fear for her life every day she leaves for work, so I'm glad she's retiring. Less money, but she'll live longer, and with less stress. And hell, she'll make $60k/year doing nothing at all once she retires, for the rest of her life, and she's still rather young to be retired.

Best to find out your employer sucks sooner rather than later, so you can move on before you've put down too many roots.