Yep... years ago I was working for one of the local engineering firms. The office had a "recycle" policy that had us take one-sided copies and place them face down in a box next to the copy machine.
Well, the bookkeeper decided to run her yearly reports, and then placed those one-sided copies back into the magic money-saving box.
Don't you know who ran a bunch of raw coordinate prints (me), and found out what everyone was getting paid, their billable rate, and the markup.
The owner was paying, literally every single employee one-fifth to one-eighth of what they were being charged out at! Standard markups for the industry at the time was 3:1 - you got billed out at $75/hr, you got paid $25/hr, or thereabouts.
The owner decided to have the office Christmas party at his house (dumbest idea ever). Let's show the employees what their blood, sweat and tears got - 40 foot siding boards helicoptered in, 17 televisions throughout, hand hewn flagstone wall to wall, etc etc. Yes, the owner gave us the grand tour (again, dumbest idea ever).
I walked out of the grand tour early, and some co-workers followed me, sensing a disturbance in the force, lol.
"What's the deal dude?"
I answered "Seriously? Motherfucker is paying us 1/5 to 1/8 of our billable rates, parading us around his mountain chalet and bragging about all the shit he has, and you want to ask what MY problem is?"
Ooops - did I let the cat out of the bag?
Needless to say, the following week, I marched my ass into his office, and we were on good terms, so, he was happy to see me. Told him, "OK, time to pay up sucka" (OK, I didn't call him "sucka", but my face did). We haggled a bit, but I ended up with closer to the 3:1 than I was expecting.
I kept up the regular "march in" until he told me, pretty sternly too, "Look, you're the second highest paid person in the office, right behind the Vice President. This is my house, stop telling me how to run it..."
After that I got head-hunted and left, which may or may not have been a great decision. But... when everyone that worked there found out what I knew about the mark-ups, the mass exodus started, and he was left with an empty office building, and retired as a "consultant".
He never forgave me, but, whatever.
You have to come to your own rescue most of the time was the lesson I learned from all of that.