Jobs squeezing as much work out of you as possible

I got hired last month as an administrative assistant in the office of a fairly new and small family owned construction company. I felt very lucky to find a job so quickly in this market and I thought it would be a nice change from the massive corporate, customer service oriented job I had prior. But I’m hating it.

There is nonstop shit to do. I have a laundry list of tasks, a lot of which are very complicated, requiring tons of knowledge about particular terms and extensive procedures. Then there’s a bunch of tedious tasks that are very time consuming and have constant issues/disruptions. During my training, we were working nonstop to the point where I could rarely take a lunch break - I was able to take lunch like 3 times over the course of 2 weeks and my manager didn’t take lunch ever. Even now after my training, there’s so much to do that there’s still barely time to take breaks. The company is very behind on some things and I’m doing bookkeeping stuff as far back as 2021. They haven’t had an admin assistant for most of their tenure, but as far as I can tell, their last assistant quit after literally a few months and I don’t blame them.

The dynamic just feels screwed up. My manager is essentially having me do almost the same exact job as her for a fraction of the pay. But I guess that’s the life of an assistant. She stayed in the office to train me for a couple weeks and now has left me to run it alone while she runs their other office in another city.

I’m starting to feel so discouraged. My last job was way too big of a workload as well and it feels like those are the only jobs I can get, places that are desperate, have insane workloads and high turnaround. This job pays way too little for what it is too. I was willing to take it because I just moved in with my bf in a cheaper town so rent costs are cheap split between us and I don’t have a car payment. But I’m only making 20 an hour when in our last city, a job like this would easily pay 25-30+ an hour. It just doesn’t feel worth it. I’d love to hear from you guys who have similar experiences so I can feel less alone in this lol